wayne crawford

Rattlesnakes do not rule the desert.
Nor roadrunners,
coyotes, vultures, lizards. Cacti
often stand guard, attack
when provoked. Ocotillo slice your fingers
if you try to steal their bones.

Agave harpoons you, Paloverdi claws.
The Mesquite tree lures you
into a carnivorous thicket. The Acacia
shrub, the Diamond
Cholla, progenitors of barbed wire.

Faxon Yucca, some call, “The Candle of Heaven,”
others: The “Spanish Bayonet.”
Sun and wind seem to landscape the sand.
The real ruler, water,
reigns by absence, too little run-off

to float a school bond, power commerce or
community, build monumental adobe bricks
or structures for the ages. Here, no sailors
draw nets filled with fish.

Blood is in the wind, the sun, mountains
and sand, the Prickly Pear.
Hands and arms scar, callous, even
tongues grow long-
insensitive
to the large hooked thorns that claim desert
fruit, forbidden.

We manage to survive, don’t we? Our
faces carved and planed like those on totem poles,
cheek bones squared, eyes
chiselled against the grain, temptation,
a cactus blossom.

The Triumphs of Motion

The woman from the church arrives
with a prayer blanket
to lay across your arms. Your
eyelids shutter a glimpse of white,
your jaw matriculates.
She looks at me
to translate. I look at you, nerves
snapped from shoulder to wrist, muscles
twitching down your back.
She says a group from the church
prayed for you
over this blanket. They believe
it heals. You don’t
hear her words,
or the words of their prayers.

Your nerves are burning fuses. Over
your arms, this prayer blanket
presses like hot steel balls, the kind
Emerson and Thoreau used
to heat their room at Harvard
more than a century ago. Your limbs
sparking, jerk to escape their circuit
of heavy flames.

You might think medicine has come
a long way, more than compresses
and morphine,
but when pain is the main line
to and from your brain,
your cognition clotted
within yourself,
maybe recalling the body you were
when you took for granted the triumphs
of motion, now
could be the age of transcendentalism,
death, the only medication
doctors know,
and I, without faith
for many, many years, fold
this blanket,
and pray.

Wayne Crawford is a New Mexico poet who manages Lunarosity, an online journal of poetry and fiction, and co-manages Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, a regional anthology. Crawford’s poetry has appeared recently in Las Cruces Poets and Writers, Shampoo.Com, NewVerseNews.com, and many other journals offline and on,

"World" by Jennifer Balkan

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