Wyoming Wind   Mostly you don’t talk about it, but when you do, it’s never just the wind — no, it’s the damn wind, or the goddamn wind (depending on velocity), and when it spits gravel in your face, blows your brains clean out of your head, halfway to Nebraska, then you know its empty, heedless soul, somehow malevolent even in its mad mindlessness. It peppers the snowdrifts with grit, blasts the green right out of springtime. It finds every chink, every crack. At night it howls its song of despair in the power lines, despoiling fences, everything you’d pinned your hopes on, all of it lost to the wind.     © Michael Fleming Dummerston, Vermont September 2024