East of Escalante
by Caitlin Dunn
How many bourbon-fueled
nights did you spend looking at him
from a canvas chair, across the fire
pit in Calf Creek? What could you have
said? Everyone else was a noisy drunk,
cracking glowsticks, smashing Keystone
Light bottles on the rusty
earth. You watched him for the cut
of his jaw and those eyes like glass edges,
but he had a girl he would marry
soon—as soon as she had her baby
and he was sure it was his.
He looked back at you for your cornsilk
hair and Ukrainian hips, but you were ambitious,
a career and a man on hold in case you wanted them,
and at first he was afraid to talk to you. Did
you know he used to smoke Winstons, but
quit? The charisma wasn’t worth
the cotton mouth. Did he know about the cheap coke
that got stuck in your nose in Sarasota?
I’m sure he knew you’d gone
a hundred on a Kawasaki once. So fast
your skin rippled. I wonder if he told you then
about the angry wasp that woke in his full
face helmet, going ninety down Highway 12.
In the red-dark of summer nights,
at the feet of sandstone cliffs,
I wonder: when you both knocked
back your grain liquor, did you meet a pair
of eyes as dizzy and young as your own?
Did you finally find the rush you were looking for?
Caitlin Dunn earned a BFA in creative writing at Belhaven University. She grew up in the wilderness and can do a mean Jennifer Coolidge impression.