Dear deer tracks, divots shaped like hearts down this
sandy wash we follow the memory of water, the stone
that is the bones of water.
Dear deer antlers
dropped or maybe shook behind this juniper, one
there, the other lee-side.
Dear juniper, so old
your ropes are fraying, your beard is shaggy and
everywhere, you wizard, your wind-carved twisted
arms lifted as if giving up.
Dear highway here
that split a nodding oil well painted a child’s blue
and yellow, and a wild paint the color of February
sand and weeds and patches of snow.
Dear arrival tracing
that ridgeline of stone, the land’s long scalloped spine
spanning the horizon. Down the wash, these scattered bones,
neck hide dried to leather hard as rock.
Dear owls
we hear call at cusp, owl we flushed
the color of winter
left alone in a thicket.
Dear creation story
told again and again in snow-
colored lichen capping the oldest crypto.
Dear failure,
I keep trying to describe this silence,
this land’s blunt vast that blinks
or doesn’t.
This quiet that doesn’t blink.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM and teaches as an associate professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, she is the author is Breath on a Coal from Middle Creek Press and the chapbook Living with Wolves from Split Rock Press. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Anne Haven holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She helps edit poetry for the online journal Terrain.org.