Before Foreclosure

Beneath the dying cottonwoods, we pry an animal’s jawbone 
from the alkaline. I tell my little sister it belonged to a sea

creature. She believes it, so I believe it. We haven’t gone back 
to the house much, except for supplies: rope, roast beef sandwiches,

flashlights. Our mother gave us forehead kisses, before she passed 
out on pain pills. We’re building a home, tucked into the property’s

boundary. We fashion our fingers into windows, overlooking 
the Bull Mountains, lash ponderosa branches together with stalks

of sagebrush, drag railroad ties through blooms of yucca for the walls. 
Next, the barbed wire separating us from the neighbor we’ve never met.

On his land there’s an old school bus buried up to its windows in dirt
and an eroded bicycle frame tangled in tongues of sheep fescue.

We work the wire, warm it like rubber, open a mouth in the fence 
big enough to slip through. We wait, listen, a meadowlark warbles on.

We’ll search for arrowheads, something to mold a decent roof. 
Two bored horses with ribs showing watch us squeeze through the steel.