Recitation

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.