BUNDY@MALHEUR

by Isaac Mason

“Let's make sure I read this correctly: Cliven Bundy requested a federal public defender from the big, bad government? You've got to be kidding me! For 20-plus years, Bundy has shamelessly been grazing his cattle on the taxpayers' dime, and now that he's in cuffs, he'll take more government/taxpayer help? My only comment: Please call me for jury duty!”  —Bill Taylor, Letter to the Editor of OregonLive.com, Feb. 21, 2016; Photo via OregonLive.com: The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office released the mugshot from Cliven Bundy's arrest.

When the elders
of the Burns Paiute nation
included in the 1868 treaty
by which they
ceded tribal lands
around Malheur Lake
a provision guaranteeing
"protection against bad men,"
it would be pleasing
to imagine they foresaw
the occupation of Malheur
by Ammon Bundy
and the Oregon Militia
158 years later.

When Bundy and Company,
strutting and fretting
on YouTube,
declared themselves
advocates of the public's right
to free use of the public lands,
it would be pleasing
to imagine they meant
something beside the right
to burn where you like,
to graze where you like,
to ride your four-wheeler
wherever you like,
and to bury your shit,
as the Militia at Malheur did,
at an ancient Paiute
cultural site.


Isaac Mason is the name assumed by a person working under false credentials at a major Chicago law firm. He lives with many cartons of books in a neighborhood where you would not feel comfortable. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Duende, Steel Toe Review, Polychrome Ink, and elsewhere.

BIOGRAPHY/MALHEUR

by Amy Eisner

Cattle at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge wait out the fog of a cold, winter morning January 11, 2016. Image source: Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Her childhood cards said interested, alert, and eager to learn.
In her twenties she was an associative thinker and loved
to work numbers, fold them like origami in a spread
sheet. But she has no head for numbers, they slip through.
Her boyfriend said it was obnoxious to put him on a list
after laundry, and eventually he slipped through too.
In her thirties she had babies, became a thing of many:
mouths, wakings, -pieced toys. By her forties she is simply
scattered. "Get your [ship] together" reads the tote bag
in the store. (She has become a shopper, provisioning being
the only news she can solve.) This week she thinks often
of white men in the cold, in the bird refuge
they have claimed as their own. If they stay long enough
will we come look at them through binoculars, mark them
by the particular scruff on their duck canvas chests?
On so much land the fog must roll in layers: blue, sooty,
breathy, tinged with sun, filling secret baskets in secret
Paiute graves, filling the bunchgrass and the people squatting
in it--new arrivals with binoculars in their mitts watching
us watch the tribe watch the birders watch the ranchers
(oh, the ranger and the cowman should be friends)
and the vision of what you can own in a glance
multiplies to a power, like Galileo's scope, devised
to make a man on a ship fifty miles away appear five.
You can see the ship, you can see the man,
but what can you own but what you admit?


Amy Eisner teaches writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her poems have appeared in Confrontation, Fence, Valparaiso, and other journals.

YELP REVIEW — MALHEUR NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

by J. Bradley

Image by Adam Rosenlund via Boise Weekly, Jan. 3, 2016.

To you, the line between your version of us
and them comes down to a quick draw,
a pithy line after the bullet finds its mark;
dehumanization is the only way
you can justify your ammosexuality.

You ignore everyone that calls you 'terrorist'.
You point out that if you were a terrorist,
you would see drones flying above you
like birds of prey. You forget how terrorism
built this country treaty by treaty
blanket by blanket, ballot by ballot,
bullet by bullet.


J. Bradley is the winner of Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction.