Wednesday Morning and Customers Want Me to Draw Out the Valley Seanse Lynch Ducken (bio) They ask me to draw a map of this county, and I say I never could. They say, Begin at the top of Snoqualmie Pass,and I wonder, how could I map that place? How can I show the way I-90 widens through the forests, rushes past cabins and human-made lakes? Then they tell me to move into the valley. To find landthat is, perhaps, more familiar. Name the streets, they say. But I can’t show the smell of timothy hay being turned over by combines or of old pear trees that bend under the weight of overripe fruit. I can’t drawhow, when I was young, the wind would stir the sour stink of cattle at the feedlot, or how my sister and I cried the first time we found out our dad’s job was killing lambs. Can I write those thingsin the white space between schaake road and freeway? These people drove into town from Seattle. They walked into the store and asked, How can you live in a place so small? So we tell them,This town isn’t small. It won’t fit on your napkin map. I won’t diagram it with a weak red pen so they can drive along the river and ask why people think this is a river. So they can drive into the canyon and askwhy people think this place is beautiful. I knew a girl from another town who stood beside me under the yellow striped wall of Craig’s Hill and said, Look, it’s so dry and ugly, it’s a desert. And maybe those are the right wordsfor this place, for the hills that curl up against the bald horizon. For low, fraying stretches of wind-battered houses that follow the highway where I’ll draw mountain sheep behind the McDonald’s, and the rattlesnakes who, migrating throughthe backyard of my parents’ first home, sun themselves in my mother’s old rose garden, [End Page 72] brown bodies opening like blossoms to the hot dirt on their skin. How can I map the sky when it is stripped of heavy clouds, a sky purple and rawon winter nights when the wind presses us back onto our heels, farther and farther into this coarse, unsheltered earth? These things cannot be measured against loops of streets and soccer fields and matching houses,where every night the lights flick on, evenly yellow and all at once. [End Page 73] Seanse Lynch Ducken SEANSE LYNCH DUCKEN received her MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She currently teaches English at Central Washington University. Her work appears in the online anthology A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology and in Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, and is forthcoming in Mudfish 19.* Copyright © 2016 University of North Carolina Wilmington