This Is A Target
Taneum Bambrick
Taneum Bambrick is the author of Vantage (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and the chapbook Reservoir (Yemassee Chapbook Prize, 2017). Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, PEN, Narrative, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Currently, she teaches creative writing online for Central Washington University, and is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Any moment a terrorist. Why we radio the man in the tower before crossing the dam. Bright Hawaiian t-shirt, his silhouette. He nods or shakes his head. This is the field below the dam you check for power-line markers that slip off during windstorms & crack in half. You can spot them from the freeway. Orange shells big as a bathtub. When you get in one it shows you as small to the men around you. You make them laugh when they can see you & they only see you in relation to them being the man. This is where you set the beaver trap. Staple wires at the stumps of what few trees stand. Signs you drive stop boats from loading in endangered wetlands. This is where the wind knocked the train off the bridge to the bottom of the river. Foundations of what was built around the tracks. Cinderblocks, graffiti. Your face on the screen of your phone in a blue outhouse. Boys from your high school starting a fire during the burn ban. Nobody listens specifically when you ask so you kick the rocks & a dozen mice scramble out. This is your thick uniform. Each part. Glossy line through your hair where a ponytail holder shielded dirt. When your boss starts the game of who can find the strangest piece of trash. Dunes where Ray hid the peg-leg before work. The meal at Olive Garden he won for bringing it back. This is the most giant American flag. Line of white trucks with numbers on the back. The job a registered sex offender had. Hot water on the hot sand. A little red knife you got from your dad.
Issue 7.1, Prose