—For DT, who provided an image

1.

They drove south from Moose Jaw in two vans

SK-36—headlights off to cut the reflection on the snow—

They were city champions, the Peacocks

The fleet behind them would be waylaid at the border:

“The fuck this look like?
Opheim?”

Everyone a gangster by degree

2.

Scobey isn’t a town so much as a marker

Kenneth Arnold is from here, for example

The crossroads at 2^nd Avenue and C Street wafted residue of heat

Farmer’s Union Carriers is on the other side of the tracks. Look north at Oie Street
and you’ll see

What they first noticed upon entering the gym was that the Spartans dribbled with
both hands

David Marks, who they said drove up each game from Glasgow, made a left-handed
layup

Coach Davidson imagined the single-track home

You cannot, he said, overplay them on their right because they’ll go left easy

So they adjusted

And then they adjusted

The coyotes shivered close

The Spartans are invincible. This means they cannot be conquered

The time clicks so you hear it decompose

David Marks, they say, drives in all the way from Glasgow

You imagine an unencompassable expanse and you multiply that by

In Scobey the wind drifts before the snow does, not just a trick of the air.
No numbers. You measure defeat by the difference, breath before its signature

3.

Empires transform in coke-fed dances
Statesmen strut about as gang leaders
(but like no gang leaders you know)
Fool, you thought the joke was on you

4.

MT-13 is straight, with a jig, to the border, its white lines useless in snow

(to be in that cut,
useless)

The window’s skein dribbles and begins to drip

Lights at the symphisis of Moose Jaw, “bone’s subtlest expression,” smothered by the
meat of clouds

He marks time on the dashboard, click of his fingers, working the left now too

“Each time the love is another planet:

we fall into it, freed from the emptiness of tapping and misfortune”

The slow dash of melting ice on water,
the brief ring a dipping vessel gives

Sean Ward is a graduate student in English at Duke University. He was born and raised in Montana.

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