Bad things / find you when you do not listen
like the little green and black mushrooms
my mother told me would grow / in the fertile valleys
between my toes and beneath my genitals
after every shower / or bath if I failed
to towel them dry, or the stories of wild dogs
that would gnaw at my thighs / If I was out too late
on heavy jacket nights. The packs of young
coyotes drunk / on harvest moonlight, bounding
across shaved alfalfa stalks, toppling calves
too far from the herd / or my favorite neighbor
Don, who found the half-chewed corpse—a sheen of
morning frost collecting / over roan soft hair
and stilled blood—still, I went out. What
did it matter that bad things happened / they hadn’t
yet happened to those I cared about most.