November 12, 2014Desert Love Poem
This is our second Christmas, the make-it-or-break-it
Christmas where we decide. I didn’t know whether
I would still love you tomorrow. So today you’ve left
on a hunt for a natural tree because we are both tired
of talking and my mother is coming to spend her first
Christmas in New Mexico, eat green chile rice at your
parents’, get to know their Chihuahuas as the dogs
hump her leg. I wanted her to have a tree, not from
the Walmart parking lot, but a pine from the mesa,
cut by you with a blunt axe—the only one we have.
You will refuse to wear gloves, knick your thumb, swear
into the year’s first snow. But you will bring it back,
remember when you hunted trees with your father last
year, how his beard caught the sudden storm, and how
he dragged the prize through his asthma home to your
mother. She cried that night, cursed him for almost
killing you both. You will then understand how she
leaned into your father after she was tired of talking,
after there was nothing more to say.
from #43 - Spring 2014