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by Charles Clayton

100 million years ago

Shifting dunes blowing sands

"New Mexico" south of the equator

Dinosaurs humping and laying eggs

1000 years ago

Images pecked on a sandstone wall

Flecks of obsidian sharpened arrows

Bighorn sheep boiled in the clay pot

100 years ago

Mormon cowboys red dust

Pause and look at pictures on the rocks

Cattle chomp on golden grasses

10 years ago

Powerlines buzzing overhead

Plastic grocery\bag stuck in the sagebrush

Graduate students ponder the hunter

1 day ago

Sunshine warm rock

Arrowheads in the soil

Cowboys in the grave

Professors explain the Anasazi

Then There Were Three
by Eric Mack

It was easier in two dimensions. Without depth there was no need for deep thoughts, and somehow everyone seemed a little less smug, little less full of shit. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Height, width, nothing more complicated than geometry--that's the life though, right? Something's in the way, you better jump over it, get under it or go right through it; no goin' round, circumventing or sneaky tricks.

There's been improvements since we upgraded though, to be sure. Flat cuisine, for one--ain't missed it for a second, and anyone who says different's lying through their fleshy fibhole. By my reckonin' the steaks and the sex are just about the only reasons we don't just upload ourselves onto some hard drive to be spit out an inkjet back where we came from. And the mountains, too, I guess. I mean, damn. We just had those all wrong before.

But I still miss it - they didn't tell us we'd be trading one dimension for another; got a wider world but seemed to lose the time to check it out. Forward progress always kicks the shit out of nostalgia I guess.

(--sent from my iPad2)


Shooting Sheep in the Sky
by Gary Feuerman

Her sister was visiting. It was still early in the relationship, maybe 3 months in. We still made love at least twice a day, and whispered to each other in the corners of parties and bars about the things we wanted to try. It all smelled like fresh raspberries. You know when you look close at a newly picked berry? The round, trembling buds filled with soft flesh and juice. A little hairy, but always ready to burst. That was us. I could do no wrong, although I often thought that what we had couldn't be real, not really. It had to burst and disappear at some point. I had to eventually stumble, break the bubble and watch the mist of love float into nothing.

So Sis was coming and I was the Taos Guy. What to do? She was a fierce intellectual, Sis, with eyes that ate and doubted everything said, but also wanted to just play and grapple. One night on the toilet, tucked safely in the back of the house, I spied a local tourist mag on top of a pile of paperback novels I hadn't read, but figured I'd at least get snippets of if they were piled in the bathroom. I reached for it and brought it to my lap. On the cover was the picture of a petroglyph - a pregnant woman praying next to a set of 4 concentric circles. Like a sign from God, I knew that this, this was the thing to do. A friend had told me the week before that there was a path off of Ranchitos Rd. along the Rio Pueblo where the petroglyphs were etched into the rocks along a little limestone ridge on the mesa.

We went there the next day, a scorching one with endless blue sky. We parked near a house, but off the road and set off into the cottonwoods along the tumbling little river. Sis pulled a joint from her shorts and we smoked it. Stoned, but with purposes, I led us up into the rocks beyond the trees. A cliff about 30' high ran north-south parallel with the river. When I got to the rocks, I pressed my face against them to feel the heat. T and Sis followed suit without words. All was quiet. No cars. No wind. No other people. I moved south along the wall dragging my fingertips along the rough sandstone. After 20 yards I came upon an etching of a vibrant sun over two sets of concentric circles with 4 and 5 rings painted in a rusty red. Petroglyphs. I could hear T and Sis breathing. We stood still and each in turn touched the indentations in the rock. T kissed me on my nose, and Sis then hugged me and whispered, "You are part of my clan."

Cavernas del Viejo Volcan

by Johanna DeBiase

I dig my heels into hard dust and stare out at a photograph in a magazine from someone else's vacation – white mountains holding hands around a splatter of lake blue. The wind blows hard, bellowing my hood up around my face. I climb the mountain, I enter the cave.

A ramble of meaningless words float around me and I will not look at him lest he think I understand. He spills water on the wall to make visible the fine red lines of some ancient sketching. His fingers trace the jagged lines. “Tall people,” he says in English, horizontal hand held high above his head.

“But how do they know that?” I ask my translator, my crouching husband.

“The last one died not too long ago.”

The. Last. One. He was a tall man.

My hip bones barely scrape through the damp tunnel, my head bumping up against jutting rocks. One knee in front of the other, one hand, then the other, one crawl closer to blind. Something falls into water somewhere. Someone whoops when they trip. A mother whispers comforting words to her child. Shh, the owls are sleeping. I commit the darkness to memory. Turning back toward a single point of light, I imagine that I am alone, for one moment, the last one in the world.