David Romtvedt
David Romtvedt’s poem in this issue will appear in his book Certainty, to be published this year by White Pine. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming, and says, “I love the winter here (though I could love it as much if it were shorter).”
Day Of Rest
This July Sunday is hotter than any I have ever felt in Wyoming. It has been dry for weeks. The sun hangs limply in the sky, but for all its limpness, it blazes. The clouds are thin and high. The temperature is over a hundred.
March 1995Disappearances
My father died on a July day in Phoenix. When he was found, his temperature was 108. The medical examiner’s certificate listed the cause of death as hyperthermia.
November 1992Loyalties
I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.
December 1991Inventing Wyoming
Everything we take from the earth, every drop of rain and every blade of grass, every bit of flower and fruit, the sinew and muscle of the animals we kill, we borrow these things for a brief time and we will pay them back. The records are kept from the beginning of time.
July 1990A Wyoming Myth
In January of 1966 an old Crow woman, tired of her age and the palsied chattering of her body, walked from Powder River all the way up Crazy Woman Creek into the Bighorns. She thought she would be as the original Crazy Woman, another Indian dying alone in the snow.
August 1988
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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