Montana’s Smallest Fish
Stacy Gillett Coyle
In Parker County, Texas, modern rustlers
steal windmill heads with eight-foot arms
like the most obdurate gilded daisies
and in Dubois, Wyoming,
where the grass climbs like a millipede
to the aspen, they no longer stock the Big Wind River—
the fingerlings don’t survive.
This year lost three species of butterfly,
and the Pawnee montane skipper dwindles
along the banks of the South Platte, charcoal-spired
from the Hayman blaze and running so low
the crayfish are biblical; the drought and fire crackling
to the American martens who avoid open space
and other martens who nest in abandoned holes
in the old growth of the Sierra Madres.
Even where there is water, a compulsion
to endangerment, created rarity: the state Division
of Wildlife shooting breeding coyotes to preserve
muledeer for hunting season, then culling the deer
for Chronic Wasting Disease, and Montana recording its smallest fish,
a mottled sculpin caught in Sheep Creek, useless really,
like a collared Jacobean pigeon, bred too fancy to fly.
Stacy Gillett Coyle’s poetry has appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Flyway and South Dakota Review. Her poetry collection, Cloud Seeding, was recently released in the High Plains Press Poetry of the American West series.