Hunters and Gatherers
Once they got back in the Expedition Kelly asked “People eat this stuff? It looks something you’d have on the porch at Halloween. How would we cook it?”
“Just think of these vegetables as an insurance policy,” Preston explained to his son. “Besides, if things got that bad your mother would go with us. She’d know how to make some kind of soup.”
“Mom would never sleep up at the camp,” Kelly pointed out. “That tent stinks.”
“It would have to get real bad down here in the city,” Preston agreed.
When they got home, they left the gourds in the Expedition and put the venison in the freezer marking some of it for the church. “You boys always look so nice going out on patrol in that clean camo,” Ellen helped to apply their black eye shadow. “Try not to bring back too much dirt and be home in time for dinner. We’ll have some of those venison steaks with mashers.”
Casey Bush is a Portland poet whose eighth collection Student of Hippocampus was published in 2018 by Last Word Press (Olympia, WA). His essay “Sisters Around the Cauldron: Mary Barnard and Her Sappho” was recently posted on the Berlin based website The Decadent Review. Casey is the poetic voice of Notes & Motes: The Vlatkovich Trio Plus One. He recommends Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
