Jacob Sheetz-Willard

Los Hermanos Penitentes

An easy place to confuse for another:
sand & slickrock, twelve-hundred
feet down, at the meeting point of two
canyons, with bent reeds where the water
has blown through. My students study
the map. They are sure of their direction.
They say yes, this all seems right; the contours
are what we had expected, but we’ve been
trending southeast all afternoon & the sun
is up there in the wrong position, the details
don’t add up. We’re sure, they say. This is it.
Such confidence we have in each other.
& now it’s June, Colorado, my half-brother
telling me about the woman he loves
who lives a thousand miles away —married,
for now, to someone else. Maybe it’s love
that stops me from saying anything; maybe
it’s my own resumé in recklessness that keeps
the silence as our beers sweat it out on the bartop
& the bill comes due. I have also wanted to believe
in desire against the prevailing evidence. I have also
held its map at an angle to make the landscape
fit. So I say nothing when my brother, half-
brother, tells me about his blazed country
of cliff edges, of burnt ochre and stone. I know
what its weather does to wear down
each surface. How the fissures shine.
It’s June, Colorado, & I have never seen
my brother this happy, this nearly whole.
We are not penitentes, I think.
We don’t believe love is like that at all.

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Jacob Sheetz-Willard is a poet from Leadville, Colorado and an MFA graduate of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A winner of the Cantor Prize, recipient of an Ellen Bryant Voigt scholarship and finalist for the ALR Poetry Prize, his work has appeared in American Literary Review, Chestnut Review, Kestrel, LEON Literary Review, New South, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.