She walks across a desert on fire
head held high in the flames
like homicidal poppies
advancing over the mesa, over the milkweed
and the cacti boiling sap.
Smoke cancers the sky
like a hell-cloud inhaling: smell
the burning hair of the cholla
and the down of the owl’s clover, see that death
is indigenous, feel the heat
of the melting anemone, the snapdragon’s hope,
the broomrape’s pride and the wind
whipping in the scorpion weed…
The desert burns like the fields of Heidagger
melting the sands to mirror
but she crosses it, my brave Mexican girl,
collecting larkspur
and blazing stars.
