'But tears are useless now./ Bring on an army armed with words,/ in love with history;/ forceful as the wind,/ entrenched as deeply / as the native grass/ and passionate." —Jane Candia Coleman, The Red Drum _______ Victoria's work is online at Lunarosity _______ For more Poetry

Victoria Edwards Tester Year of Love and Death It was a year of love and death. Across the San Simon Valley, the bare mesquites were wreathed in doves, and in Oklahoma the blue-eyed murderer my wild sister slept with was taken by the Duncan sheriff, her gloating ex-father-in-law, and here at the mouth of this canyon when the silver badged-voiced neighbors called to ask about a pair of mountain lions they were hunting, we lied. Stood in the big tracks and said we saw no sign. Gift In the dark rains of August they called Phillip to track the bodies of two boys who were horsing around in the Mimbres river. Their mother looked down at a rainbow in her lamp, and when she looked again, her boys were gone. Maybe she threw that lamp into the river. Gave the flood her light. Her rainbow. Her wedding band. Any gift she could find to bargain with. Turns out they washed out on a far bank way down the other side, too far for calling, but more alive than you or I. They remembered they were holding hands when they born again, like twins. They spent the night among kind strangers, men or bears who built them a great fire, who showed them how to raise their hands to greet the humans they warned would cry when they saw them waving there. By Lamplight My husband's hands on the strings of his guitar while the mountain lion licks the deer's liver and I tremble at the October falling against a single oil lamp. We used to speak to each other, each sentence marked with twelve blessing questions like the trill of quail in shadows. When we finished all the speaking, we were oaks. We had yes and we had no. Harder than these pale rose cliffs. Harder than love, and the wind that carves the rose cliffs. Just as ordained. Just as alone.