25 Sep Back 40: Horse Prairie

It was down in Horse Prairie
where elk hid in the timber,
and our bellies laughed on
Ellis Peak. We will drink
the sun all the way back
to the Stage Stop.

Enjoy brown bottles
with broken ranch hands,
whose path is cut in
heifers, cactus, and rope.

They told us the herd is on
the east side of the Pyramid, but
I can’t let you use the land.

I didn’t care to walk up
another mountain. I thought
about summer in the tall grass
and her waiting for me, in the
blue house on Ford Street.

Ben Clarence Tjaden is a writer raised in Oklahoma and Ohio who lives in western Montana. There, he works in commercial landscaping and spends his free time fishing, hunting, and writing about the American landscape and memory.