scattered

 

"perception alters not only the past, but landscape itself, and landscape in turn, shapes consciousness" 

                    --Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land

A long road reaches its wispy arm through a desert, extending into the distant mountains.

 Clouds gather but dissipate. The wind whips flecks of trash into barbed wire and tosses tumbleweeds across the road. 

Here bits of me are scattered: a bone there, an old Toyota pickup burned out in a fire rusting in a dune of sand, a dead dog. Lizards scutter across a dress I once wore to a wedding (not mine), and a snake coils beneath the shade of a pile of lumber--what's left of a home I tried to build with my own hands. 

Do we collect or leave ourselves forgotten in the dust? 

I keep walking toward the western mountains, objects dropping off into the dirt in my wake. At the end of this road, when everything has fallen away, I will step out of my skin as if stepping out of a nightgown. I will be nothing but air. I will rise on a thermal, I will circle the sky, higher and higher, and then, I will be stars.

a land

From the sky, the land below stretches out in memory. The Colorado etches her serpentine path through a landscape both familiar and far away. Below the grama grasses, little bluestem, mesquite, cottonwood and juniper whisper in the hot wind as night falls over a land as known to me as my own body.

What is it to know a land?

To love its contours and fissures, its smells and colors.

Is it possible to be so utterly familiar with a place, an Other place, as I am with this one?

My heart aches for lake smells and cicadas droning into the summer heat.

This land is no longer a place I call home, but it will always be the blood coursing through my veins. 

The Devil's Mare

 

Super excited to share the launch of our recent screenplay, The Devil's Mare. A great collaboration with my co-authors Christopher J. Oglesby and Patricia Zamora. 

Check out the Story: https://thedevilsmare.com

1.28

fracture

 

here

the sage flies by,

blue-green clouds along the edge of the road 

until

you Stop.

shut off the engine. 

roll down the windows

open your soul to the 

nothing

but wind and the

Whoosh, Whoosh

of giant wind turbines.

here

the red earth fractures, opens like a vein

emitting whispers shushing up from the cool sand of ancient riverbed below.

like spells.

hold still

and no one might notice the crack

that has suddenly opened

inside you.

the red earth

of your heart

gaping beneath the sky

a long line of eighteen wheelers

surge forth like a Norther'

howling the whispers of the earth into a fugitive memory

the windows close

the engine hums to life

the wound is sutured 

and you travel on.