This is what I call home: dust-burnt dirt, a rose of sandstone and bone but a rose in slow blossom.

         Here the space is Russian-blank (a God-great blow drier), where milk-sour ooze belly-drips from thorns and blown-brown thistles. Here I find hiding: the grass-coddled Crossings, wind- slapped & dry: The atmosphere, a cacophonous-croon clucking itself to a dun thrum.

         From Lone Mountain the grid is talus-torn, slap-jagged. Our own yard is hard as thigh- bone. The tree-spot, weed-choked in overgrowth.

         A pink tint as pink as a baby on the glade crust.

         Shank sun-falls, plus heat-drag and lagging splash of sprinkler-spout.

         Even in the midnight: Dry-tumbling dust devils and smoked-blinks from behind the

sunken-sag (thirsty and baked bald and dusty).

         That’s mother in the iron-green apron; coffee-brothing. Sometimes I remember her spoon-

shining and soup-cradling ladles, shoring up my morning-blood with brew and a brunt-breath of chocolate. (In the back, a cat-cradle gary and peppered and reeking.)

         The door, blue with a rust-crush twang, hammer-guzzled, butter-bronze sketch. Trying to catch some cool.

         Wanting green, I rear-view watched the Strip red-rot as Redrock, buzzing-blurry and hazy and jazz-gloomy and gone.

         Now, the desert rind cracks and blind-yields bare to bed me back: balance is restored to its order after hankering for scraps. This is what I carry with me: Sun-scars, temptation, pilgrimage, prayers.

Image by: Edward Mesiak