when the power goes out we cook dinner on the woodstove
juniper berries in glass we use
the back porch as an ice box in
winter it's full of apple pies and sauer
kraut, mud stuck boots and white
plastic tupperware
once a week we carry blue
barrels to the back of the truck zip ties
keep them tight and drive up blacksnake
road to the spring where water drips in streams
from the mountain top slipping through rock
miles of down in spring it is a sound roaring
in your ears in summer we wait days to fill
a bucket there is water at the cabin but it tastes
like ash and sulfur, like rotting eggs
Sarah Summerson's work has been published in OTHER. Magazine, Aji Magazine and Collision Literary Magazine, as well as an anthology of Southwest poems from Dos Gatos Press titled Weaving the Terrain. She is also a winner of the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize and the William Uhler Hensel Sr. Prize.
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