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Bad Wolf

Laura Da'

You Are Here, Ada Limón

I jusk the houses from the land, each one
as similar in size and shape as the battered
crates behind the shipping store. The lake
wasn't here with its jagged edges and dikes

puffin glike keloid scars, so I drink it.
I uninvite to receive more clearly what
the fringed prairie might have been
with its controlled burns and bone games

and berries. In language class, I am learning
the story of the wolf who is perpetually punished
for his bullyish pride - made to pursue a hornet nest
and drown in his own relection, snout

gleaming with the honey he was hoping to bite.
I repeat phrases and parse pauses from stresses.
The markers I seek are nearly impossible to find.
What is under this water and what was once water?

Here where a trail once crossed, people gathered
then the hop farmers dub axe-heads and projectile
points, still bearing the scar from the plow. Within
five miles the battles of the first treaty wars

are under barns and soccer goals and signs
allowing recreational drove flying. At the prairie,
a solitary Douglas fir's high branches start
well above my head, telling me it was once

one of many. I must move the tendons of my chin
and hold my tongue differently to string together
the consonants of my language. To say wolf, I have to
open my lips in a pantomime of alarm.