POEM BY SHELLI ROTTSHAFER
PHOTO BY DANIEL COMBS

I just saw coyote
laying down in the open field
out front of Cid’s
where during the summertime
the community garden blooms.

Hunkered down he awaits
the field mice. Yet being bright of day
he is not too inconspicuous; and
knowing his luck, he raises his head to peer
ears pointed toward periwinkle,
their triangle silhouette mimicking distant mountain peaks.

At Fechin House, Taos’s Art Museum, I read of a sad, sad time.
Bosque Redondo, Hwéeldi, Fort Sumner.
While interred there, those held captive
created ceremony, the only way they could
through their stories. Through re-membering.

In one, coyote is caught. But once set free
those who witnessed, watched
as he bounded West, toward original homeland.
Predicting yet too, the internment return.

Once home, the remaining story was revised
a slow healing, now captured
within the bounds, zigs, and zags.
A permanence tethered in weavings.

Blanketed upon the wavering horizon
the moon’s curve still murmurs a will
after a long, long journey.

Poet, educator and advocate Shelli Rottschafer completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2005 in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 she taught at a small liberal arts college in Michigan. In summer 2023 Rottschafer began her low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, Gunnison.

Photographer Daniel Combs, originally from Waterford, New York, has traveled the world as a sommelier and in the pursuit of capturing images through his lens. Together with their rescue pup, Combs and Rottschafer reside in Louisville, Colorado, and El Prado, Nuevo México.