FIRST PLACE GRADUATE POETRY

Spud
by Russell Winn

Dad named the dog
after another dog in a beer commercial.
It didn’t stick for long.

When the Spud herded cattle in the valley,
Dad showed him how to move like a Navajo,
like he had moved in his youth,
quickly and straight toward the group to drive them.
The dog was kicked in the side by a young bull
and after that would hover just outside of range. 
His name became Ten Foot Pole.

One time the cows got on the highway.
Dad used the Chevy to push them back.
When that old blue truck hit a bump and the dog
flipped out, hung in the air like a pinwheel,
Dad didn’t bother with the rear view,
just kept driving out to the river.
His name was Grape Shot that day.

For lunch, dad would take blue corn flower,
roll it into soft slabs of dough.
k’ineeshbizhii noodles.
“Geen eesh beez shi” he’d say with me.
He fed those to the dog too.
Then the dog’s name was Noodle Nose.

On the way to the river he leaped out of the truck,
and landed on a black chasing dog,
then he was a fighter. He bore war wounds.
Dad sewed him up and bought antibiotics.
But for weeks he walked like an old prize fighter.
His name was John Wayne.

Then dad busted a knee tripping on barbed wire.
He went to the hospital, got an infection,
and told me he was proud of who
I had become.
The dog sat on the faded back porch, and
looked through the dirty glass door
at old rubber ditch boots and fencing tools.

Quail Killing

Fresh death has its own yawning
earthen scent.

I drive to work today to smell the death.
It straddles the corrugated tin
of a still bird coop,
drapes dry gravel floors,
hangs under the bald wooden eaves,
stills the wild birds this Thursday morning.

Jon says a coon got in, cornered
quail.  Chewed off tops of heads.
We sweep pink strips and light
coffee feathers into sticky balls
of sand and wet.  Scoop mounds
of clumped hay slivers and dust
into black plastic bags.

Jon’s response will be swift:
six raccoons in six days.
Treed, trapped, and holed with buckshot.
I’m not very good at growing things,
but I can sure kill them.

All those quail left over, those
who clung all night to the top net,
upside down, wings pulsing for balance,
sit in silence.
Among Rorsach clots of dust and blood,
they require no solace.
They do not huddle in packs and hiss,
do not look for answers among their own.
They simply breathe.
And await the heat of noon.

Miss Afton

Grandmother’s hands shelled thick peas
with a slick, wet sound.  Fingernails like old
fossils.  She told tales.  We sat in dry
clumped prairie dirt, hooded in heat and flies,
among dusty green sinews of squash and pea plants,
and imagined her, a girl of the Bear River Valley.

The bugs there hummed with purpose,
thick tides of mosquitoes off the river every night
washed a tenor over the bass of the big black bees.
Cows spread across arid grass like slow splayed fingers.
Olive trees reflected sun off silver-gray slivers,
leaves that twinkled sleepy green.

She spoke of the ranch and how she with her thick dry feet
and gray dress grabbed the garden hose
and that smooth sumbitch was a blow snake.
You never seen anyone ran so fast up a bed
of greasewood and into the trailer.

Us hillfolk pay attention to things,
she said as she squished fresh
tomato pickings under an accidental heel.
But if she said there was rain you believed her.
And if she pointed out a weak calf in a herd
he’d be dead with the first cold snap.

Later I saw her in town,
resting in dark textiles under the creak of a Lazy Boy
hidden behind the tang of urine and 409,
attended by clear plastic tubes and Coumadin
bottles, The Price Is Right
humming on a wood paneled TV jammed in the top corner
of a light-filled recovery room.

When grandpa died and they took her here
she just shook her head
and said she could use the quiet.
She spent all day listening to the old green heater drone