Wyoming

I dressed my limbs in sheaths of sunscreen thinking this is the solitude you wanted.

I carried a pink, insulated lunch bag. Mosquitoes spat kisses on my arms and ankles.

Each night I fell asleep to a show about two teens on the run from murder.

On my way to work, I couldn’t quite see Big Horn through the haze of a faraway fire.

A magpie grazed by my window. Hard to say if it was the same magpie or its mate.

The diversity of animal heads hanging on the Western Saloon’s walls could put any decent
zoo to shame. I counted the taxidermy to keep from looking at the white people looking at
me, if they looked at all.

When you cut open an animal, which way do you point its gaze?

While eating a turkey sandwich with pepperjack by the creek I saw a coyote pounce upon an
antelope fawn. The scene was so noiseless it could have been paradise.

I said to nobody, I am about to be married.

Preeti Vangani grew up in Mumbai, India and is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions, 2019), selected as winner of the RL Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and Hobart among other journals, and has been supported by Ucross, Djerassi and California Center for Innovation. She is the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. An alumni of the program, she teaches at the MFA program at University of San Francisco. Preeti is currently working on a manuscript of poems and a collection of short stories.