Dear E.: July got dry. So I stole a few arsenic sips from a tailings ditch.
I didn’t know it was possible to trespass on public land. BLM did.
Sent cavalry and deputized cowboys to herd me into Ruby Valley.
I would have signed any treaty they offered. But all the treaties
were already broken. I sought allies in aspen groves. They were sick,
nostalgic for the times before the gold mines. All I found was the
specter of a Basque separatist shepherd. He still hid from Franco
and his fascists. With sympathy, the Basque presented his skeletal
sheep and a creased print of Guernica he kept in his back pocket.
I needed a lamb. He only had mutton. In his wake, a lithic scatter.
I sifted through the flakes for projectile points to aim at assault
rifles pointed at me. When they cornered me in an ancient antelope
trap, they said it’d go better for me if I just gave the water back.
Like ancient antelope, they could have used their batons to club me
to death. They used their tasers instead. In the end, I gave my
water back. But not to them – to the front of my dusty pants.
Not to worry, my new orange jumpsuit is baggy, comfy, dry – Will.

Will Falk is a poet, attorney, and community organizer. He writes poems while traveling across the US to offer free legal services to communities fighting against extractive projects like mines, pipelines, and clear-cuts. His first poetry collection is When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Wayfarer Books, 2023).