Sour
It’s dark and your pants wet to the ankles.
Bottom of a well.
The water becomes ink, blood.
Your hands scrabble rock,
knock dust.
A black
cat hears you.
She hides.
The blood is water again.
Doesn’t matter if it’s tepid,
or freezing.
It soaks you.
“Black cat! Come back!”
She curls her tail.
Green eyes flick.
You’re souring
someone well.
Arson
The sun and red eye glower.
Seeds blossom in your blood.
Trees burst into flame: you turn away—
marked and stung,
sick and blind.
If your eye offends you,
cast it out,
or your whole
body will be cast
Into the fire.
Host
If you swallow it,
it dissolves in your belly,
Becomes ash,
Becomes rock,
Becomes jerky.
It veins,
leeches,
smothers.
Break its fingers
from your neck.
Desert god
White chalk,
red rock eureka.
Here, washes
and streams
are scars.
From the fingers of the desert god
drip gold.
From his eyes, quartz.
From his feet, chrysolite
and opal.
Under his soles, sapphires.
No one lives
near his face
scorning
hot scrawl.
Painted Desert
In bones are souls.
The petrified tree
knows the painted sun
has drunk her colors.
Hissing rattlesnake,
desert patterned:
diamonds, exes, hexagons.
Joshua tree
smells like churned dirt.
There, you bow, forehead to root,
ribs abandoned to sand.
War/Love Song
From your eyes, dew—
your mouth, flowers.
Like hearts offered
to the desert god,
yours feeds the sun.
Fear
Hollow in your pounding ribs:
bad dreams.
A chain saw
popped your tires
and left you in the Mojave
where they'd
dropped rocks
from the sky.
There,
the desert
took over and you became bones.
Millions of years later,
splinters of your body
washed ashore.