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In my dreams Buffalo Bill busts down my door with his furry voice. It's like summer lightning, but the strike and the brush fire—the oily sparks of buckskin, sombrero and crimson shirt— shriek to the floor and fizzle out before the hungry calm sets in. I am empty as a mountain, choked with scree and…

How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…

It's staying light later, and through the pyracantha, Through memory and its prickly blood, A teenage boy combs his hair two healthy ways, A flood of rainwater flowing at his floppy shoes, The rain loosening the oils of the street, Freeing the clenched buds on a plum tree. He combs his hair. Something has to…

If you expected a recital of weather, wood, water and grass, or a photograph of me, cheeks whittled as peach pits, forgive me. For all I've seen is Indian women gathering flower seeds, their dark arms reaching, their movement as monotonous as the Sierras themselves. All I've become is a mineress: I've washed a pan…

In the last grove of ohia, mamane, and gray-green koa at the top of the Mauna Loa Strip Road, we met a ranger coming down. He had been hunting a feral goat that had broken through the fence. Such animals destroy the forest understory and native plants, and spread weeds that drive out the more…

I had this dream that a river Ran beneath my bedroom window And a pretty woman With dark hair and dark skin Was swimming in the dark water below. But somehow, strangely, I wasn't In the river myself. I couldn't enter my own dream. I can't think of a damn thing to do. Paranoia really…

I should have taken her, she was the only thing I saw in Panama I wanted. —Mary Jane Megquier The girl had the aspect of the plantains she squatted over: chartreuse-bright and curious what would follow. “Compralos,” she said, rattling coins in her palm. There were no shadows but her obsidian hair. “Sell her to…

These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

Six months            later Sandra was found Murdered in a                  ditch. Lying With the blood Leaves. Scattered                        dirt Of Oregon. Four of us            fucking A cheap motel on The limes            of Van Buren.            Then we Switched. Sandra slips On the wet            tile Floor. These flakes Melt…