Barbara Westwood Diehl

Canyon

Visitors fall into this canyon. People from all over the world fall here. Some are later found in pinyon pines with camera straps still wrapped around their necks. I tell you this because you won’t read this odd fact in the postcard’s caption, and I want you to be wary.

If you visit the gift shop at the lodge, you will find books about deaths in the canyon. As if this makes Utah a more exciting place to visit. As if you, too, might consider slipping from the crumbling lip above a scenic overlook. As if you might like, when the native plant identification group moves on from the mountain phlox without you, to step into a deception. Into the canyon’s beckoning. Sirens singing in its depths. The myth music filling the hollowed earth. Filling it with fictions of light and shadow. Stealing your east and west. Making you rudderless.

Do not be deceived by scenery. By what you see through a camera. By the seemingly solid edge. Stay tied to your mast. Your name does not belong in the index of this book.

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Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Per Contra, Thrush Poetry Journal, Tishman Review, The MacGuffin, Atticus Review and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.