POETRY BY

Trinity Herr

Photo by Camden Jones

Controlled Burning

It blisters down to boundaries —
marked and measured.

Dig the fire lines wide —

wider, even, that the breadth of our campfire,
the metal ring circling it —
these rounds we rest on.

Whoever’s in charge, please —
make the distance further than that
between our thighs.

Torch it with purpose.
Method. Burn every dry twig, pinecone,
and clump of grass until there’s no fuel left —

until the ground is barren.

Let the listless blaze grovel, smoldering,
thirsty for conflagration.

Let it die of hunger — starved like a locust
after plague work.

Let it fall, head first, from the orange smoke sky
to smack against the earth. Let it thud

like maplewood, difficult to split
and seasoned three years, from your
familiar hands

into our shared flames.

We Follow

Five minutes up the road from my mother’s house
the snow lays flat and sterile gauze white.

We hop in the old Toyota, shovel, chainsaw in the bed,
noontime beers in hand, with a pistol resting easy

in the empty ashtray, just in case. Up past the logging operation
where Mike Pihl’s boys are clear-cutting another hillside,

our best-known world erodes off the mountain to the east.
Out toward the snowless Willamette Valley submerged

in fog. Halfway to the top, a couple from the city
have high-centered their Subaru. They were unprepared.

So we share our shovel and a few minutes’ time.
We smile because our dogs are both named Cooper.

They turn back, but we keep going — take an unmarked road
to where the timber and sky opens like an icy mouth.

At the summit, the pure powder breaks with the tracks
of a lone coyote dipping down from the last treed ridge.

We follow the soft indentations in the snow for miles,
one tiny paw placed perfectly in front of the other.

Trinity

Trinity Herr grew up in the rural Oregon coast range. A poet and storyteller, her writing has appeared in the Sonora Review, CALYX, High Desert Journal, and Hobart among others.