Now in coming between one desert
and another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.
I dip my hand into the bath
over your hair.
I ask you not to shave.
I ask, open the error.
And skin blades open the river.
And your great eye opens over a ruined field.
From here geography extends a labored pulse.
More music, palmed casings. This love story a horse still drunk from
war, where I am the incredible absence of her jaw. A soft pink gaining.
You say Dearth is no name for a horse.
Here, how she rises
from every pussing wound.
The officers gouge jasper eyes
from the mud. I love you.
…
Dearth, irrational, makes empty the valley. From elongated shadows,
pulp of her desire.
When this happens we must love ourselves fiercely, the ancestors
and lost humans declared.
Thee human who was wearing the hat of a particular sports team.
The human who dropped their hair comb.
The human who thought she would reach Utah by Tuesday.
Only deserts witness the slow and complete life of water.
A story of chassis. And foraged box springs.
The one sound offered wandering night without horizon.
Each exceeds its genre while remaining truly intact.
…
This epic has no hero but flesh
which defies imagination.
The carrion large birds fear, ambulant and calling your name.
Foregrounding and comments for what hinges beyond a thorough
wound:
Likely to suffer, my gift stumbles graft with sores.
Bring me the officer’s music.
Bring me the landscape gouged from your eyes.
…
Low-basin flora. Verdant.
Inching vertebral ache.
A warm anatomy to feel threatened;
endangered by;
thick-muscled and in danger of. Iridescent over.
And in the tissue between floodplains and the officer’s science.
And the quiet between and want for shade, the hooded eyes and fluid
body.
Gentle body for whom I lie down.
…
Tonight I walk the dog, committing to memory the darkened color and
shape of each car to pass.
So it must have been for the first stars to harvest light from what they
followed.
I’ve placed a shotgun on layaway. A service I haven’t used since I was twelve.
Having unlearned to be ashamed of needing time or not
knowing how to use it.
Knowing the distension harbored in the officer’s heart. (Perceiving it
through its disciplinary veils.)
The horse stamps out from waxy brush. Viral smell in the cuts up her
thighs,
Tell me, baby duck, your wrecked unsleeping door.
…
Love, if you are where I am.
Even your smallest of errors.
Your most wrecked door.
The rock faces are opened.
The genres are all up for aerial eradication.
To the forty-yr-old fish. To the abundant bufflehead and ring-necked
ducks drifting south across the sunset. I love you.
From Alt-Nature by Saretta Morgan (Coffee House Press, 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Saretta Morgan. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Coffee House Press.