Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Trent: Letter from Her Many Difficult Pathways

Letter from Her Many Difficult Pathways
By Letitia Trent

—after the Journals of Lewis and Clark

The rocks and copses
force a physician
upon me. The horses
are not to return. Consider
me. I broke through the ice.
Remember that I am the epistle,

encamped for the night
at the mouth
of the river,
in great peril. Do not forget
to love me. The ice

broke away and came
down in great hills
of wolves and ibix, on which
our entire party dined.

My abracadabra
killed the ibix.

The land is beat.

I have declared it
so in two hundred
unpublishable manuscripts.

Letitia Trent's work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Folio, Ocho, Blazevox, and Gulfstream, among other literary magazines both in print and online. Her chapbook, The Medical Diaries, is available from Scantily Clad Press.