Anniversary

It is a Sunday, late in November.
We wake to frost, douse the last embers
of the tracking season’s final campfire,
full knowing what we wish to not remember.

Tents folded, packs shouldered, we hike, ever higher
following the narrow ridge in thin dry air,
recalling in synch – unspoken, but understood –
Austin’s enthused words: “Please just let me die here!”

Would he take those words back if he could?
Three miles more and we stand where he stood.
On one side the cold and thunderous bay,
at our backs the edge of the evergreen wood.

For minutes we’re paralyzed. One year to the day.
Not one of we four can think what to say.
Our silent wish: that he never suffered.
Then Adam shakes the box; ashes fly and go astray.

As if telling us here he wishes to be interred,
From the hemlocks Raven’s dirge is heard.
The scattered ash, Sorrow’s tattooed emblem,
binds to our jackets and jeans, gray and blurred.

It is a Sunday, late in November,
and we know what we wish to not remember.

Nancy Cook serves as flash fiction editor for Kallisto Gaia Press and also runs “The Witness Project,” a program of community writing workshops in Minneapolis designed to enable creative work by underrepresented voices. A social practice artist, she is particularly focused on intersections of geography, history, and cultural heritage in her work, which has appeared in a number of publications, including The Michigan Quarterly, The McNeese Review, and Gulf Coast Journal.