In some ways we’ve moved to the desert, in others
we’ve been sentenced. The thorn of me
when his kisses bloom. The barkflesh
of palo breas a wrung green, supplicants
who mimed for water so pathetically
they moved themselves, forgot their thirst
and became intent on gesture. I’ve never known
what to do with my hands. But I can make space
inside myself, a succulent, and drink slowly. I can wait
until I duplicate. I’m a cactus in reverse. It hurts.
It doesn’t hurt. It’s time to click bottle tree
castanets with the children. A muster
of peafowl roost on the library roof. Our eyes dart from drab
to glam, hen to cock. They descend
from a pair brought from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair
to gussy up the hardpan. What penetrates, what softens
these calcic horizons, though, is nothing. When I imagine
a future here, it pools on the surface, silty tonic
I fuse my lips against. My eyes plunge in the peacock’s crest, attempt
to decipher the blue. It’s not pigment, but structural, a matter of light
interference and angle. I feel myself scattered this way,
and when a woman emerges from the library’s double
doors with her brood, I’m immersed in the story of her
miscarriage, she’s pregnant, pulling a wagon full of speakers
and amps through a rare rain, the field empty now, and she
scouring the Bermuda grass for her lost keys. . . it seems natural for her to blurt
this pain to a stranger. I can’t fully attend, nor can she,
the peacocks being larger than some of our children, our children
angling to pluck such color, and that’s what makes the sharing
easy, like two swimmers’ limbs grazing under water. I forget
this reserve of sweetness in me, past all the barely soothed
seething, clutch of versions I can’t un-nest, harem changing
in the makeshift fitting room at the center of spread
fan-tails. Like any mother grows eyes
in the back of her head, hears danger tucked
in the quiet, knows whole people can burst through.