Someone lived here with tools, their resourcefulness
blue with cold as they did the work of keeping
alive in the off kilter present, I don’t keep track
of the hours on a clock at breakfast,
at lunch or again at dusk, thinking about time
I treat it like a commodity, spendthrift
until December, in line with all the other
shoppers, lamenting: not enough minutes in the day
even as I go around, toned and complacent
because my house is convenient with a thermostat
on the wall, the calendar overflows
with color coded tasks I have not considered
they have their own afterlife; strangers will be excited
in the future, unearthing a cross section to find
my deeds protruding, like a tusk
Author Note: Domebo Canyon, Oklahoma is a Pleistocene Age archaeological site containing the skeleton of an imperial mammoth, several arrowheads and evidence of hunting.
Ashley Oakes lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she works as an academic tutor. Some of her poems have appeared in Westview, Claw+Blossom, Meetinghouse, Unstamatic, Cypress Review, Jackdaw Review, Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere. In 2023 she was a finalist for the Patricia Cleary Miller Award For Poetry at New Letters Magazine. More recently, she was selected as a reader for the 2025 Scissortail Literary Festival at East Central University.