Mortal and unbaptized in open soil wedded with leathered creosote, cactus wrens, an abandoned microwave, grotty folding chairs, and a wooden headboard half-buried in the sand, I laid down beneath the sun, bright and mean as a hungry skull, searing both the sky and my skin into a mustard color wheel. I stayed. At first, I found familiar things of hope like water, tomorrow, and a Peregrine falcon’s ball-point eyes as butcherly and as inky as a splaying universe. With time and to the lilt of the drifting earth, I began to lose count of pennies, cotton shirts, drinking straws, postage stamps, days, highways, verbs, names, and the intimate palpations of time. Sinking into the boiling sand, a few more centimeters every day, ready to emulsify in this hot place – my mind unstirring from its shell and these barnacles of self unbecoming. Yes, atoms uncorking their own protons and protons uncorking their quarks and quarks uncorking their strings until only vibration remained. Only then was the outlook unfixed of second-hand truths and as raw as unblessed wine. What sweeter bliss, my friend, than our crisis of ambivalence?
Elizabeth S. Gunn serves as the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Business at Nevada State University. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, Nevada, where she lives with her wife and their three rescue pups in the endless Mojave Desert.
