Tricia Elliott

Tracks The hardest day with the cadaver wasn’t bisecting  eyes, unpeeling genitals, or sawing through skull to the muted corrugated brain within, but dissecting hands. Last night I dreamt of tendon-strung puppets  heavily-lined palms, nails chewed to the quick each cut between hands…

Crescent Moon Wolves sang an evening song when the moon was a slender saffron slip not cinema-full over popping buttons and silvered claws but a scissored cut-out in jack-o-lantern glow its hue a match for ripe gooseberry  soft skin of…

When Trees Fall Yes of course we make a sound. All of us herehearingwhen you do not.  Just this morning (as you slept) every stone spoke in a vibratory roar so loud, the sea responded in kind. Spruce, bark-beetled and…

Treasure Twice now the younger dog has brought home bony bits of dried, twisted skin, one side pale-rough, the other dense with soft brown fur  so like her own. I too have nosed some treasure out of forest duff, like…

Origins Black capped shrieks tear the sky into sharp angles  winging vivid pale across blue, catching  the midnight sun’s  horizon light  in scarlet blades. There are none fiercer near nests, except every mother.  It’s unwise to generalize  about arctic terns…

Skipping Stone Sun When the bears emerge, blinking, filling  their risen loaf lungs with  bracing blue sky the sun is already high, skipped  across seas of feathered cloud crests like a thin stone thrown, no longer low-angled but  flicked-winged and…

Wolf’s Track The steady staple shrew tracks ended in  owl wing hush, a loss so singular I mourned. Last night, the long  late winter sun  stained the mudflats frozen rose, the clear sky  persimmon. Even the mountains blushed.  Today, fresh…

Winter Snakes arrive  tight-coiling the night like sky sinews grounded, dark-wrapping the trees with glass-shard scales and the mountains, brilliant  in skin-shed waves  of translucent drape send slides wind-lit, ashen and thunderous, curling sea-soft to mirror pale-stars in spell-blanket light,…

Blessingfor Janet Open the door.  Let the dust blow in and know me again, here in the curved wrist of tree, the salt shade of stone. Nothing is lost that has known this sky,  that has been this old sea. …

Winter Browse In twin-tracks the tender  bark’s peeled away, stripped  bottom-to-top, south-to-north exposing a weathered skin beneath the black willow, marked sentinel body expressed as moose, browsing while the crone snow whorls  through the inky forest her rough, white fingers bending…