O:JA&L Poetry: All forms & styles
Jennifer Anderson
RATTLESNAKE
My mother had not yet stirred from inside the tent trailer, and my father had already left. I knew he sat in the boat anchored above the rapids, waiting for a steelhead to strike, a fish he would later smoke in our driveway’s gutted refrigerator to share with family and friends. Despite the rifts my lying had caused, my family and I got along on these trips. The canyon allowed us to slip into the past.
I headed downriver, toward Wapshilla Creek, where the remnants of deserted homesteads still bordered the road, where bunchgrass pushed through metal bed frames, and floorboards gave way to rot. Here I could lose all sense of time among the relics these families had left behind, the rusted horseshoes, hay rakes, and horse-drawn plows abandoned in the star-thistle, as if someone had said enough and simply walked away. My family had come to this place deep in the Salmon River canyon every autumn since before I was born, pitching our tents at Skeleton Creek near the crumbling rock wall a man named Sourdough Jones had built a hundred years earlier, a man whose herd of cattle starved that first winter, their carcasses littering the canyon floor. At the top of the highest ridge overlooking our camp, there was a stack of basalt resembling a pagoda. “That,” my mother said, “is where I want my ashes spread.” My father made it known that his remains belonged to the river. I laid claim to a mountain a mile up the road, bare but for two bushes at its crest—one wide, one tall—that could pass for a couch and lamp. “A comfy seat,” I said, “to watch the river wind past.” For us, this place held more meaning than home.
Still, at fourteen, I had lost my way.
A breeze rustled the leaves on the gnarled hackberry trees as I walked. I’d paused to pick a burr from my sock when in the shadows I saw a rattlesnake. It was young, no longer than eight inches, only three buttons at the tip of the tail, and too cold to sound its warning.
I didn’t think long before doing what I did next. I picked up a large rock, so heavy I needed both hands, and dropped it on the snake’s head.
It writhed, stunned, white belly to the sky, head trapped beneath the rock. I too was stunned. Years earlier, when my brother and boy-cousins aimed their BB guns at songbirds in the woods behind my grandparents’ house, I begged them to stop. And I still couldn’t kill the fish I caught, swinging the flopping bodies on the end of my line to my father, for him to unhook and thump on the head.
So what had made me kill this snake? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know.
I wanted to give the rattle to my family. I thought they might display it at home. Same as the bouquets of wildflowers, already dried from heat and sun, I’d plucked from these same hills—golden yarrow, tall mullein stalks, and thistle. I ached for their praise. And hadn’t they been warning me all my life to watch for snakes when walking this road?
But, as with most things at that time, I hadn’t thought it through.
The snake finally stilled after another rock and another, and I sliced off the tail with a shard of basalt. Cutting through bone and skin was gruesome work, my jagged cuts shredding, mangling the flesh. I kicked the carcass to the side of the road and made my way back to camp.
When I presented the rattle to my family, I hadn’t anticipated my father’s disappointment.
“Sis,” he said, “we taught you better than that.”
Later that afternoon he went out fishing again, my mother lounged on the beach, and the bloodied stump of tail dried on a nearby rock. The cold nights had turned a cluster of sumac across the river as red as fish gills. I heard them sigh on the opposite shore.
About the writer:
Jennifer Anderson is an associate professor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, where she is also the faculty advisor for the college’s student-run literary journal, Talking River Review. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, The Cimarron Review, The Colorado Review, and The Carolina Quarterly, among other places. In 2019, Anderson won The Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for nonfiction.
Image: Melita: Out of the Heat (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its several imprints, including Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Controversies, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
HAL: HEURISTIC ALGORITHMIC LIBRARY
REVIEWS
HAL’s reviews engage with contemporary chapbooks, pamphlets, and individual collections, treating them as occasions for serious critical attention. These essays consider books not as isolated products, but as living intersections of craft, place, memory, form, and moral imagination. Across works by poets and prose writers associated with O:JA&L and its imprints, the reviews emphasize accessibility without sacrificing intellectual rigor. They attend to how small-press literature carries aesthetic risk, regional texture, and formal experiment into public conversation. Together, the reviews establish a record of attentive reading, situating each work within broader questions of literary value and artistic endurance.
Click on the links below to explore or download the free PDF pamphlets.
CORRESPONDENCE ACROSS LANDSCAPES:
Dialogic Poetics, Ecological Imagination, and Relational Masculinity in Wolf Tree and Agave,
a lyric correspondence between Larry D. Thomas and Clarence J. Wolfshohl
A HOWLING AT THE THRESHOLD:
Transformation and Wildness in Wolf by Bruce McRae
A REVIEW
OPTIMAL OR NOT and Other Poems by Heikki Huotari
A REVIEW
THE HINGE OF ATTENTION
A review of The Selborne Haibun, a collection by Gabriel Rosenstock
A STILLNESS IN MOTION
A Review of little prose by David Person
The Shape of What Remains:
Land, Memory, and Moral Weight in TOPOLOGY,
poems by Richard Stimac
A REVIEW
REMEMBERING IN FRAGMENTS: HAIBUN, HAIKU, AND ETHICAL MEMORY
A Review of DUST AND RUST by Taofeek Ayeyemi
THE OUTRUN: Poems by Julie Alden Cullinane
A REVIEW
MIRO’S WARS: Poems by John Brantingham:
A REVIEW
WHERE THE CROW BREATHES BLACK STARS:
Larry D. Thomas and his expansion of the crow archetype as established by Ted Hughes
BAD ROAD AHEAD:
Flash Discourse, Trauma, and Voice in Don Robishaw’s Just Willie Please“
A REVIEW
