Zoe Boyer
On Belonging
Heat upstairs like a second skin, I throw the windows open,air chilled by a shaved-ice sliver of moon, string-section wail
of crickets quavering from the junipers, but the rodeo is loud,
bullhorn shout and twang echoing over the mountains,
rooting for cowboys through each buck and fall, bulls
begging for grass-soft pasture, night’s blue calm.
I have wrestled with belonging, unwanted, haunted by
antlered heads pleading from store windows, Confederate flags
blazing from truck grilles, swastikas painted beneath the bridge
while the creek carries on plucking its siren song from
flow-worn frets of granite. But the Arizona mountain kingsnake
striped white and red; white wave of prickly poppies
in monsoon wind; red hourglass of the black widow’s
sleek abdomen—this is the nation to which I pledge allegiance,
to which I’ve given every piece of myself, liquescing into
the creek’s fetid waters, hurling my body like any old bone
into thickets of scrub oak where deer ribs and rabbits’ feet
glow pale as bindweed. I want to leave my heart in the dust
beneath a prickly pear where it might be mistaken for
overripe fruit, carried off by coyotes to the luminous crag
of Quartz Mountain. This is the high desert’s trick:
even as speakers crackle, crowd howling approval
of a bull stoked to mad-eyed throes of torment,
a resinous breeze wafts sweetly from the ponderosas,
the land still offering up its beauty like a magician
pulling furled white silks of datura from its sleeves.