Mother Tree
Once, it came to me,
clear as spring water in granite:
After she dies (my beloved
mother), I can still visit her
here—
This here, hidden. Where will I find it?
Fog shrouds the tarn,
slips in talus cracks.
Whenever we are in the high country,
my mother says,
the imperceptible change of change
her secret poem, the pleasure
in the roll of her voice, the little
cliff of silence she savors
after that last word,
change—
Darkness
Mornings, I make tea
by headlamp, then sip in darkness
so I can hear the first chickadee, the slow
ooze of pale light that darkens the trees
and makes me feel the vast-about-to—
I’ve had a few converts—friends and lovers
who tell me they now walk softly by
headlamp, hold their cup of coffee
with both hands in the dark.
In a lab somewhere, they’re engineering
leaves to eat more light, to never sleep.
Here comes another human hustle:
No rest! No death!
Even lichen need to sleep.
There goes the best thought I was cooing to
with my dream-rinsed brain, my washed-in-sleep
courage.
Noon in California, smoke blacking out the sun.
Noon in New Mexico, tinted copper
dusk, ash on the hood. This new era
of fire-dark, wrong-dark, sick-dark,
never-true-dark.
It used to be a comfort—nights, seasons, storms,
all the ways we used to feel small.
I am still hunting my speck-of-ancient-starlight,
my splinter of fingernail in the long outstretched arms
of earth time. My sudden feeling near
spawning salmon of being carbon,
digestible.
More animals like elk and bears are hustling
to evolve to sleep in daylight, emerge at night,
nocturnal to avoid us.
When the hummingbird was frozen
in torpor near treeline, the biologist put her gently
in the soft dark cave of his armpit, closed
his eyes until he felt a stir there, opened
his cupped hands to a whir of wings,
away—
Our body’s darkness, warm balm.
Merely human, I want to understand how
my eyes and skin adjust to starlight
that is already dead.
Come, here’s a place where the land
lies down in deep darkness. Can you feel
the breathing, the sweet sighs?
Can you drink the milky smear of the milky
arch of stars some call a road, some call a way?
Ponte trucha
for Eliud
he said, meaning make yourself a trout, meaning
watch your back and use your whole skin
to listen. The way trout shadow and slip
into darkness behind a rock, scatter and smear
into ripples. When he was a boy, every creek
was full of cutthroat, old growth
on Cumbres pass where rain and rills
and rivulets threaded through. Even acequias
that flooded the fields sent fish
flopping in grass.
Like this, he says, belly down
on shore, his long black hair tied, arms extended
like wings, boot tips tucked in a crack
for purchase. Another inch he could
kiss the river, eyes closed when
his hands lower slowly below the cutbank.
There are caves and tunnels there
where fish have never known fear.
I reach
below the surface, feel cold mud, torn roots,
then silk—firm shock
where my fingers find
the belly of a brown trout. My eyes
closed, mind bundled in fingertips.
My hand
around the fish’s flank leaves a scrim
of water between us, the trout swaying
inside my loose grip.
I tame
my longing, disbelief—lento, mas lento
he says, while I wait and coil,
release in spark and spring
and clutch the fish
with just my hands—
—Inside my hands,
flash of mind, muscle, flank
the color of sun through smoke, red
stars—
touch
body and mind of trout, which is
body and mind of river.
Here Come the Lesbians and Their Dogs
They’ve paid for hip reconstruction.
They’ve paid for transport from the streets of Baja.
Daily, they dab grease in his withered blind eye.
They kiss each other across the tender
pink and brown spotted flesh of her belly,
sprawled open. They stop kissing
to kiss this.
They tell the same stories— when the shepherd ran
off for weeks. When Maple was a ball of fluff
hiding in a cactus down the reservation road
to Chaco canyon. When the chihuahua high-stepped
her first snow. Should we keep her? They wink,
again and again.
Here they come, kicking up dust
in their four-wheel drive trucks crossing
the rutted road to cliff’s edge. Where
the Chama snakes up pale canyon cliffs
and fields of sage stretch out
where dogs can run.
They mark their lives
in dog deaths.
Think of it, sweetheart,
if we’re lucky, we’ve got time
for one more dog.
These poems originally appeared in Anne Haven McDonnell’s Singing Under Snow, winner of the Wheelbarrow Prize (Michigan State University Press, 2026).
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches as a full professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her most recent collection Singing Under Snow won the Wheelbarrow Prize with Michigan State University Press (2026). Her other books include Breath on a Coal, winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Living with Wolves from Split Rock Press. She is co-creator of the forthcoming Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, Spring 2027). Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, a MacDowell fellowship, and poetry prizes from Narrative, The Gingo Prize for Ecopoetry, and a Terrain.org poetry prize. Her poems appear in journals such as Orion, The Georgia Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She serves as co-editor for poetry at Terrain.org.
Read Anne Have McDonnell’s Letter to America poem plus four poems, four other poems, two poems, and the two poems that won Terrain.org’s 5th Annual Poetry Contest.
