Poem of the Week | August 05, 2024

Once a year, complete a 3-mile distance jog over level terrain in 45 minutes or under carrying a 45-lbs. backpack on Vibram-soled boots in order to qualify for wildland firefights.

We drink beers behind our rusty analogue cars and vomit and take dope and vomit more, waiting to race. Dry heaves in late February. It’s an internal transgression to waste substances. There is still hoar on the stalks and awns. The sun is beginning to shoulder and jog.

Is it the year of the dragon? Or the year we don’t make it? Cigarette breathlessness overcomes and leaves us behind the mark? The year of the beggar? The summer where we have to go back to illegally harvesting trees and schlepping pilfered lichen sandstones and poaching elk and mulies and selling drugs and curbing intakes? Is this the year of the baggy surplus jackets, the camouflage pants, the bright fluorescent lights, the pocketed Natty Ices? How much does an old rifle bring down at L & M Pawn?

Or is this the year where rage crowns, blows down on flesh in a microcosm of relative-humidity deficient weather, kicks hot and cold air like volleyball titans, like warplane engines, like something pyrophilous that lulls you into a tension sleep?

Is this the year where we buy cheap meat slabs from the back entrance of Decky’s deli, slice it hunger-thin, draw strings and salt across the attic and sell junk beef jerky to the tourists who fish the stocked lakes and drink to incompetence? The year of the backburn? The year of the frozen creek, of the widowmaker afire?

Or the year of the chameleon again? To posture accomplished auto mechanics without tools and sheetrockers without masks and passenger-seat firewood tossers and landscapers without estate? Denuding the measurable life and laughter off the mountainside to stack latillas and vigas for the house of the parvenu man?

If I could sleep I could forget the hot air, the ash lung, coal feet, the appetite lost to emotional weed withdrawals, the soggy bagged sandwiches and the slight delirium shakes of hand. Corky carries crack rocks in his manipulated pocket watch and doesn’t sleep. The sawyer is clean and happy as his curly sideburns are thick. Half of everyone speaks only Spanish or Indioish. The only half you can trust.

Is this the year we reappropriate forestry chainsaws, find charred or ivory elk sheds in the residuum, bring cases of Gatorade and rainbows home for the kids, the boxes of MREs for the wife or side-partner, maybe a fat enough year for each? Fat can be the holiest of all omens. Is this the year of the flares and valence, of repurposed forestry outfits, of batteries and flashlights, of barterable goods to shore up the winter? Is this the year we sleep at home or in the dusty lot across from Allsup’s?

A person will willingly burn if you let them doze through the fire’s encroachment. A soul will cut barriers around heat and snuff out embers all day if you question their worth. A smiling visage will rage-laugh at shale walls to taunt the absorbance of echoes.

Is this the year of poverty stabbings? Is this the year Donald Duck puts his coke-bottle glasses on the other side of the rifle sight? Shot two foolish boys who enticed his lover? Donald Duck always brought ragged western-genre books on the fires, now he’s in Raton prison for a while. I was going to bring him some McCarthy; for reasons unknown, he’s a Norteño country boy and distrusts Jimmy Baca.

You always know it’s a good year when you get a whole jalapeno in your lunch pack. It means you’re close to home. Long bus rides by the hour wage and grateful residents and loose arson are more effective than confession, Pādre.

The arduous test is also known as the pack test, ass test, mule test, pack fuck, packed ass, and ash crown:

Once a year, complete a 3-mile distance jog over level terrain in 45 minutes or under carrying a 45-lbs. backpack on Vibram-soled boots in order to qualify for wildland firefights.

The fire shelter is a thin sleeping bag of reflective aluminum foil bonded to woven silica cloth and is referred to as “the shake and bake.” Emergency or temporary basis only. The superheated air into the lungs is what kills you. When underneath the shelter, dig a small hole deep in the soil to draw in cool breaths while the timber explodes and the skin flays off the shoulders and vertebrae pillar. There is nothing but humility and appreciation at the end. The most desperate material you can imagine between you and the audacity of nature.