There is a place
In New Mexico
Where small children dance like starfish
And my mother swims alone in the oasis at night.

Here, she remembers the desert.

She slept on the floor
Of pueblo ruins
Among siblings and desert winds,
Warm beneath the silver blanket
Of her grandmother’s hair.

When she was nine,
The Oldest of All the Cousins
Tied feathers in her hair
So she could fly away, if she got scared
When their grandfather’s coyote howled at night.

This is the place
Where aunts became sisters again
And painted their lips with rose colored earth
To leave kisses on the foreheads of husbands
Who wore them as sleeping third eyes
Who grew out their beards in old age to cover
The places where they forgot to smile.

She watched a generation of wives wait for their husbands.
Men who took walks in tall grass
Talking politics with conquistador ghosts
Speaking Spanish through smoke circles.
Whose skin always came back paler, more expensive
Until their wives could no longer tell
The living from the dead.

But she was carried for miles on her mother’s dark back
When her feet were blistered from the sand
When Time bid them farewell with a kiss and Godspeed.

She was carried so she could stand
On the Four Corners
With arms outstretched
And scream I told you so,
Of women
Of ubiquity
Of the gathering of cardinal directions,
To the broken mesas above
To the bearded nonbelievers.