sediment at milk river

Erin Russell

a house in butter prairie wind,           dirty home on a crooked hill
nothing like heat off the cracking plain
to make you read more closely—
I’m looking for a theory of position not being,
petroglyphs eroding all over it
a difficulty of bodies not biologies
diapsids mouthing a badland moon—
sometimes I think I don’t ask the right questions 

I’m talking about a slick karst karmic tumble in limestone bed sheets,
bog glass scraping a swab-rose sky, lightning swiping the hoodoo horizon red-cliff raw: your sentinel claim of stoned gods collapsing—
the way she followed you around most of that year, parhelic sundog thing
the way we lacked a hermeneutics:
once-molten rock embedding the gills
the coulee runoff stopped with silt
what kind of snake am I lying out naked like that in switchgrass




Erin Russell is a writer from Calgary living in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in Scrivener, Montage, Time Out Amsterdam, Burning House Press and The Holland Times among others, and has been translated into French and Chinese. She won the Wycliffe College Poetry Award at the University of Toronto two years in a row. She lectures in literature and writing at Amsterdam University College.