Kimberly L. Wright

Leave this campground as you found it, more or less,though hard to do after nearly a decade. Acres of pine trees chipped and pressed into mountains of court-mandated legalese — one copy for me, one copy for you. An uneven moonscape, stumps jut like nubs of rotten teeth. It takes skill not to trip over…

Down the path at the end of Gardenia, cut out by trespassing feet like mine, I wound next to a ravine so unmarked and unremarkable Google Maps couldn’t tell me where I’d been. At the beginning of the trail, a glimmering graveyard of plastic bottles blossoming like mushrooms feeding on damp, aluminum cans too forgotten…

I. Exhalation of doglike warm sea air with hints of what’s rotting in you, wrapped in fur laziness with doggy smell and teeth, destroyer of worlds and work, best friend and worst enemy. II. Pain comes in on puppy paws, carried in the cage of scimitar claws, snarling, eye-twitch, Let slip the dogs of war?…

An Aztec medicine man, whose name has been lost to history with bushy, serious eyebrows like my grandfather – an ancestor of his? – oh that is my Anglo approximation. I don’t know their language – to wander the underworld on a fact-finding mission. He rendered his disciple fit for the journey, slitting his throat…

The check engine light, constant as the North Star in the dashboard constellation an ignored warning on the black and orange horizon where glowing indicators and digital numbers twinkle, silent and constant, from the metal, plastic, circuitry occasional grunts and groans mixed in from the beyond among the grumbles of the living engine, struggling like…