"Bigfoot Loses Heart" and "A Meditation," two poems by Mary Crockett Hill
Sasquatch at the End of the World
Bigfoot Loses Heart
When berries were scarce
I ate the chipmunk who
ate the berries.
When my fur made fingers of ice down my back,
I told myself stories of what it must be
to wake inside the sun.
When rain would not stop
I waded into the river. I sat on a boulder and spat
where the current parted around me.
All was as I wished it to be.
The notes I scrawled in the mud each sunset
were happy notes. Day this. Day that.
But now I do not know where I have put those fingers.
Now I’ve lost the hole inside the hole.
A Meditation
The snow makes some things clear: the deer
has been up before me, as has the fox
is what I spoke into my phone’s voice-to-text.
No Mike I’m waiting for your call: the beer
has an offer for me, as has the fuck
is what it heard.
I wanted to consider how snow compresses time
by showing tracks, one moment layered over the next,
to visit the waste of each footfall I had stacked
invisible along a circled path these twenty years—
but I was made instead to wonder
where Mike had gone, why he didn’t
call, what the beer was truly offering,
and what, the fuck.
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