Antelope Valley, Idaho

Antelope Valley, Idaho (a prose poem)

—Renée E. D’Aoust

In the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness you wait—gear ready—for Indian Paintbrush to shrivel and die. I pack your saddle bag: dried fruit, chocolate, quick oats. Catch myself falling toward you like the elk caught in your archer’s eye. Your arrow flies through Western larch, cedars, Ponderosa pines. “A clean kill,” you whisper. As the elk falls, I find solid ground. It is a good hunt: this looking for self through you.

[This poem was previously published in the literary journal Northern Journeys.]