.
my aunts look like my
mother as they age, lovely
eyes and smiles that blow
all the fuses. their blood
pulses ancestral coal and tin, skin
slick with a ranch’s fresh
stench of branding: in this case
.
colts and
madness and
– oddly –
social justice a rich seam, shot through
the bedrock of calving and misogyny.
.
rage and shame, too, evenly laid,
thin but
persistent lodes snaking
through each sister.
.
how alive two are yet, how
men stunted them all,
the girls.
now they fade.
they stare out across dry lawns,
all the colts broken
.
and we cousins sigh,
softly and half lost like the ranch
left fallow for our
winter.
orphan poems 