DNA: Memory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Teresa Méndez-Quigley

told herself that she had gone crazy, truly out of her mind, if she what she imagined was happening was any kind of real at all.

Still, that night, her final one on the trail, she ostentatiously lingered overlong beside a creek, stripping off her shirt and bra and splashing icy water on her face and chest and under her arms, and she was not at all surprised to find the still-warm rabbit’ s carcass beside the tent when she returned, its neck neatly broken by what appeared to be a single, decisive blow.

Skinning it took some doing, but she managed, and she simmered the pieces in some of her wine, and although she might have wished for some mushrooms, a little thyme and chervil, a quick grind of coarse pepper, and a dusting of flour just to bring the sauce together, still, it was a passable meal, better than passable, and after she ate half the rabbit, and finished most of the wine, she lay back in the grass and let the stars do their slow cartwheel overhead until she was nearly asleep. But before she crept into her tent, she took the uneaten pieces of rabbit, and put them on a rock some distance –but not a great distance – from the tent, and found a good-size stone with a hollow in it, and poured the last of the wine into the depression. Then, standing before her tent as the moon rose, she took off all of her clothes (“Don ’t sleep in the clothes you cook in. ”) piece by slow piece, and stood a long moment in the moonlight before dropping to her knees and easing into the tent.

Yet again, she slept deeply, but not so soundly that she was unaware of the warmth just on the other side of the tent wall, so close that she knew if she were to put her hand to the flimsy nylon shell and push just the slightest bit, she would feel a mound of muscle and the regular rise and fall of deep, yearning breaths.

In the morning, there was no trace of the wine and rabbit, but there were more trout, beside a heap of purple-black huckleberries. She ate them one by one, bursting them against her palate with her tongue, closing her eyes against the intensity of the flavor. When she opened them, he stood before her, fixing her with the same golden gaze. He waited patiently while she gathered her things, then walked beside her down the trail. At some point, she reached out and rested her hand upon his shoulder, absorbing the heat of the sun-warmed fur, pressing her fingers against him so as to sense the blood coursing just beneath the skin.

He hesitated when they approached the trailhead. But they had already come too far to turn back, and she looked at him and nodded, and so of course he came home with her, and that is how he became her bear husband.

Gwen Florio first worked in the West during the 1990s as a Denver-based national correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. During her time at the Inquirer, she was also a member of Philadelphia ’ s Rittenhouse Writers Group. She has received two prose grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a residency from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Florio now lives in Missoula, MO, where she is city editor for the Missoulian newspaper. She is afraid of bears.

DNA: Memory

By Teresa Méndez-Quigley

So we were watching a documentary on cows standing not in fields of green grass like we saw Upstate, but on cement, squeezed in together with black surfaces from their droppings that get washed up into lagoons and run off into waterways, and how they still moo, but mostly how they only get to eat corn, though I’ m sure they recall in their DNA memory the way a blade of grass felt in their mouths, how the breeze cooled them by the creek rippling beneath an old weeping willow and how they hope to rub up against a tree to scratch their hind quarters or be able to switch their tails to tag a fly.

Teresa Méndez-Quigley, a Philly native, was selected Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Ellen Bryant Voigt in 2004. Her poems have appeared in four volumes of the Mad Poets Review, Drexel Online Journal, Philadelphia Poets, and many more.