A Right Unexercised is a Right Lost
Ruth Williams
At the top of the crags,
a man and woman,
a knife and a gun.
Say they’re from Missouri,
hiked up and down these mountains,
always stop at Colorado City, halfway.
Open carry covers the whole range
in a holster,
on a belt.
My sisters and I discuss where a moose
was spotted, photo by the trail’s entrance:
brown hulk in low brush
by the dry stream bed.
We haven’t seen it. It came south,
searching a new home.
We’re not stalking it, we’re seeking it.
All the way down, the couple walks behind.
Stalking?
Seeking?
When you carry a weapon
what does it add to your body?
Symbolic or
dead weight?
Flies circle the trampled grass
where too many went off trail.
Yellow wildflower petal stuck
to my sister’s shoe like a third eye,
how much can we can carry,
how carefully?
Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press) and two chapbooks, Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press) and Nursewifery (Jacar Press). Her poetry has also appeared in literary journals such as 32 Poems, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, and Faultline among others. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at William Jewell College.
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