COSINE WAVE

How the land
works against us.
The border of animals

divides your mother’s property
horn to horn, breathing
through holes in the ice

through crusting hooks. This was all
I could make from plenty
this green velvet

hollow eaten in the snow
by the glacier’s milky water.
Sun covers snarled timber

snow in goldpans
mechanical harvesters
the yearlings blanketed in red.

Winter like a long tongue.
Here in childhood
my body is always dangerous

and is afraid of nothing.
The hills flatten down.
Light’s a scale

that clings, light’s a method.
After childhood
that lengthening is like a hunt

like bringing home a kill.
The stalk is white and brittle
and the meat is full of stars.

Montreux Rotholtz’s poetry collection, Unmark, was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Prelude, jubilat, The Iowa Review, the PEN Poetry Series, Fence, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.