Hiking Las Ruinas

There, the bus exhaled me 
onto a far-found field where I wrapped 
my tongue like mossy grass around the bricks     
of a church named el rescate. Here, 
in a field bent to ash by wildfire,   
the old oaks rise. A red-backed coyote  
waits as my daughter falls behind  
and then rushes ahead. She finds  
a ravine that could have held  
water, but doesn’t. So, we toss  
the several sticks she’s gathered back  
to the field, and she screams, full    
into the sun. I wish again 
against this stroller that I’ve been  
pushing over rocks worn down  
to their copper, since she broke her toe,  
wanting her to feel her body here, to climb 
these mother-of-concrete boulders     
that part the morning mist. She wants 
to take home dead branches for her father, 
a token of her time without him. We  
settle on a smooth stone still wet  
from god’s unfinished promise  
to part the waters. She looks  
as though she’s about to tumble  
into the sky below her.     

SHERRE VERNON

Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the author of two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (fiction) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Her work has appeared in TAB, The Chestnut Review, and others, and was nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in several collections, including Bending Genres, Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. Read Sherre’s work at sherrevernon.com and tag her into conversation @sherrevernon.