Near the driveway
my son and I pull up
moss beds. We dig
along the green row
of glass bottles edging
the garden, & finally
feel a hunch of luck
after we spot a large rock,
glowing with yellow
flowers that have fallen
from the guayacán.
I let my son feel
like he’s doing most
of the heavy lifting,
until the rock stands upright.
But instead of worms,
we find a coiled viper
as disturbed as my son
is transfixed, already
poised to strike.
My son loves a hunt
& he, too, is ready to attack.
“Papá” he says,
“I’m going to kill it
with my hands.” Urgently,
I step in front of him,
try to explain this is not
like the imaginary wolves
we track at dusk.
But to him, it is. To him,
it’s still all the same.
Russell Karrick is a poet and translator who lives in Colombia. His collection, The Way Back, won the 2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award. He is a recipient of World Literature Today’s Student Translation Award and Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. His poetry has appeared in Redivider, The Offing, Bat City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.