Thanks for coming!

Dog Eat Crow Magazine has changed, my friends. We've switched formats, locations, and looks. We'd like to thank all of the wonderful contributors who have graced us with their words and poetry over the last couple of years. Your words are beautiful. We love them.

But all things change, and DECM is no different. You can now find us here, where we will be publishing exclusively the work of young writers (14 to 20 years old), and helping make the first year of the Best Young Writers contest a smashing success. So, if you're a young writer and you want to see your work in print, come on over. We'd love to have you.

Rez Dog

By Janet Shell Anderson

The deep winter moon lifts over the Pine Ridge Reservation just after sundown. The west wind sings to itself as it scours the rez badlands, cliffs, escarpments, chutes, as it bends over Quiverhill, Ghost Canyon, Bear in the Lodge Creek. Coyotes twist their barbed-wire cries over the night.

 

One man, hunched against the wind, ignores the moon, the coyotes, walks west along the old dump road, a gravel track near the badlands escarpment. Joshua Fast Elk, angry, grieving, dark head bent, dark eyes fixed on the ground, doesn’t see the moon, hear the wind, care about it. His younger brother, Melford, his only family, has just died. Nineteen. Pneumonia. No one saved him. Melford was worth saving.

 

Josh knew Mel was sick, but Josh thought it was just a cold, went to work thirty miles away in Kadoka and didn’t get back to their village, Wambli, until late. Josh didn’t know Mel left the house, passed out in the old Gethsemane Cemetery in town where he’d gone alone, sad because his girl, Kate Quiver, broke off with him.