By Leonard Adame
The sky is at its most ominous
in the desert–it is the repository of snake-eyed
glints, a place where molcajete stone is born
distance doesn’t exist there
nor does it in the blackest
sector of the sky: things just appear,
flare like anemones and then, and no
one knows how long it takes,
they disappear–
like the light in the woman’s eyes
in whom direction is now a drowning prayer,
like the warmth now cooling in her womb,
like the wish to eat cilantro and cebollas
and serranos again straight out of a molcajete,
to feel them on her tongue, feel the serranos
commanding the others to merge into
a little universe of their own
this woman who left comfort and comales,
sarapes and fires as small as babies,
who left a mother now feeling the desert
wind in her bones again, a father knowing
that men are at least as cruel
as the astral specters waiting
to do what they wish
with his daughter–yes,
she left these things because, like
God’s processes, staying
or leaving may mean the same
as wandering the black desert
or waking to an interstate
flooded with cars, each swollen,
ironically, with a driver’s failing career–
she walks on: she could be her baby
in its own darkness and knowing nothing
about how the quiet universe
waits for her, for the right time
to let another black outcome flower
