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A Woman Explains the Presence of Bison

By / Issue 11

Knapweed blazes, lunatic blue,
spreading its poison
through gray and gold grass.

Ice smokes in the sunlit ditch
and Anne stands by the bison fence

telling me how her Arapaho grandfather
found one, rheumy and sour-furred,
                          pacing the northern border like an outlaw.

With white men and ropes
he wrestled it, trussed it, and hauled it here—

where it sired,
went mad, and died of colic

inside a cattle crate, its stomach on fire
with foreign flowers.

RYLER DUSTIN’S poems appear or are forthcoming in The Best of Iron Horse, American Life in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and has performed on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam. His book, Heavy Lead Birdsong, is available from Write Bloody Publishing.

RYLER DUSTIN’S poems appear or are forthcoming in The Best of Iron Horse, American Life in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and has performed on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam. His book, Heavy Lead Birdsong, is available from Write Bloody Publishing.