Jennifer Handy
Jennifer Handy explores sexuality, psychological trauma, mental illness, severed family relationships, and environmental issues through poetry. She is the author of California Burning, an environmental chapbook. Her poetry has been published in Chalkdust, The Closed Eye Open, CommuterLit, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Loud Coffee Press, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Wild Roof Journal.
photo by Jeff Singer
Ecotourism
A traffic jam on the narrow winding road past the Visitor Center
between Petroglyph Canyon and Rainbow Vista:
people honk their horns at first,
then shift to park or neutral,
get out to see what all the fuss is:
a herd of bighorn sheep.
Rams with enormous horns meander across the street
like nothing happened,
people snapping photos.
Afterwards, they caption them:
Valley of Fire, Bighorn Sheep.
A line of people wait outside to enter the exhibit:
Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species series,
ten silkscreens in all,
one of them, the ninth, entitled Bighorn Ram,
a portrait of just the head in profile,
the head fluorescent blue, the muzzle yellow,
the horns a shade of muted lime.
Afterward, they pass through the gift shop,
buy an official postcard:
the bighorn sheep is next to last,
before the rhinoceros, after the zebra.
They keep it as a memento.
Meanwhile, at some indefinable location in Arizona,
a place without an address or a name,
I wake up and put on the kettle,
and a bighorn sheep walks by.
It’s still a lamb, not too young, but alone, a little skittish.
It catches my eye,
bleats something I take for a shy hello,
then trots off into the distance.
I have no photograph or postcard,
no proof I ever saw it.
