From the
visitor center
we watched a truck
ford a trickle
of bony cows
the supervisor’s finger
tracing the way
across drought-stricken
mesas and gullies.
Bouncing like lamps we took
one wrong fork after another
finding no evidence
of Awatovi
until late in afternoon
stumbling out of a
lurching switchback
into a wire fence
a Keep Out sign
and hot dog wrappers
scattered beneath
smudged blackboards
of clouds.
In 1700 they’d come
by darkness during
the Wuwuchim,
the people of peace
led by a renegade priest
flinging torches
of cedar and corn silk
into kivas where
foreign gods ruled
fractured clans.
The old Hopis
won’t talk about
Awatovi
believing it to be
a place cursed
by the restless dead
the same unsmiling ones
who burned
a peasant girl
in the marketplace
of Rouen
(and when I tried
to steal a witness
and transform loss
into a keepsake
on a dusty shelf
it turned into
a little black
centipede
slithering between
my fingers
leaving only
charred ladders
of weeping).
Doug May is a proud member of the neurodivergent community. He would like to share with Strangers & Karma readers that since childhood his IQ has measured in the 78-86 range & he has also been treated for ADHD. He has worked a lot of different unskilled jobs, while his poetry has appeared in Breath And Shadow, Wordgathering, Raw Art Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cathexis Northwest, & many other poetry & disability publications. He is working on a memoir reflecting his experiences as a differently abled human being.