We know how to cut ourselves off.
After passing through Show Low, driving through stands of ponderosa pine, kicking up clouds of red dust, pointing at specks of Harris’s hawks hanging up in the thermals, mile marker 372, turning off highway 60 onto forest road 117, wheels crunching, songs like “Red Wing” winding through our throats, horny toads flashing through the juniper and dry summer grasses, road bending, trunks flashing past…
We see the homestead sign and feel our blood calling to the dirt.
Our white skin does not belong here, on the homeland of Pueblo and Apache.
Sierra Trigo stands bare and bald. I hope the monsters in our campfire stories do not take up residence there.
Bryson got acute appendicitis on that trail once, and there was no signal to call for an ambulance. It wouldn’t have helped anyway.
We fill our mouths with imitation maple syrup from a gallon jug and pancakes cooked on the expanse of grill that moments before had been covered in thick pine sap. We eat and eat.
We feel snakes along our sides at night. We lay in skinny beds in ancient cabins under moldering quilts and shudder.
Rain comes and we are different. Opaque brown puddles swallow our faces whole.
We sing “Abide with Me” and listen to stories of cattle-wrangling and great, great aunts.
The children are wearing handkerchiefs around their mouths.
We throw horseshoes and heat up old cattle brands to burn into planks of wood.
We are sick of our blood.
We are sick and we want to go home.
Rook Poetry 
You this this so well. Wow.
great great aunts… that got me! I’m awake.
Thanks for sharing,
Wow! That works wonders.
Having never been to Eastern Arizona, you painted a spectacular landscape for me of ponderosa pine, dry summer grasses and highways in the opening stanza, and then you darkened the scene with ‘monsters in our campfire stories’ and acute appendicitis with no signal to call for an ambulance. The reality of snakes and ‘skinny beds in ancient cabins under moldering quilts’ isn’t so appealing. I’d want to go home too.