Badlands

“Caw, caw, caw, brother, are you deaf? The hunters are close by, just over the hill. Save yourself!” -Indigenous myth, Plains people, North America

…we have nothing to lose
but the death of the earth
-Sharon Olds, “Addiction Sonnet”

~

We’d been driving at least a day through desolate prairie and the disruptive all-at-once then gone-again alien feel of the land on reservation territory in South Dakota. We’d driven miles, whole chunks of empty time with no cars in sight. One by one slow at first a sca…