The river came through here once, and when it left it was steam. Bad ears, that river—
thought our oxbow promised stream, didn’t know our shores so sharp they sometimes 
carve the consonants away. What did it expect, that river? This is a land of shattered 
bottles, slivered glass for sand.
	You ask if all our men have artificial legs, if every door’s a mirror, every woman 
named Conundra? There’s our hotel: stay awhile, see. (What’s a while? Time here, it’s 
measured in vials, meted out by a five-year-old child.) And of your other questions: do all 
our stinging nettles sing as they sting, our wasps whisper their scent for flesh, all our 
birds rat-tat-tat on metal all day? Stay!
	Nothing dystopic about us here, don’t worry. Not a pickpocket in the place. (So 
what if we have no pockets? our Head Comedian says.) Though we live in glass houses, 
we have no stones. (It’s true that we were prairie once, that switchgrass grew, but that 
was before the mountains moved in with their suitcases of white & green, the deer armed 
with 22s pouring out of the four-o’clock train.)
	And for you today, special: we’ve opened our vault of secrets, for in secrets we 
find happiness, & there’s no end to our secrets: they’re like our money: we just make 
more.
	Here’s one.
	Y’all have terrible taste, a tour guide shouted at us once, so to gratify his group 
we gathered in the public square, cut out our tongues. What a dumb thing to do, they said, 
so in chorus we said Who’s gonna give you directions out of town now, lost ones? but it 
didn’t sound so good, all vowel & pain, & they fled in horror, & we laughed, the old 
tongue-tucked-down-the-throat trick, ketchup-packet trick— that’s the kind of fun we 
have here, we with our sharpshooting deer, sun setting through the steam of our spent 
river, our women’s triple-callused feet strolling the strands of slivered glass, lovers 
spreading copper blankets for picnics.