Counting winters, pondering the Buddha
nature of cattle; at dusk, memory
becomes gentle, breathing self-indulgent.
He rises, and history flops in folds
around his feet like ill-fitted clothing.
He steps out and kicks it aside convinced
he can find a better fit. Emptiness
wakes unbidden, a dark suckling that drains
his veins and curdles his marrow as it
sidles intimately up his backside
into its familiar spot beneath the
catch in his voice and whispers apropos
of nothing: cull this heart from the herd.
Judith Solano Mayer is a Pacific Northwest transplant. Her cowboy-sympathetic ganglion can be traced through both sides of the familia back to the original vaqueros from which it morphed, sadly, into its current armchair version.