Arizona was a dry attic we broke
into. You told me how we entered in a window
splitting under the weight of sunlight,
how the crack closed and opened like lips. You told me
I could put my finger on any crevice and feel
shadows of coyotes and quartz slip
into my fingerprints. You said,
“Even the sand reflects turquoise.â€
I was there, with my pick
and my shovel, jogging Sherman Alexie
and this is what it means over asphalt where animals kept licking,
eyes hard like the petrified wood we searched for,
our hands dusted, the scorpion tattoo on your back moving
beneath the sunlight, mirage. We sang tongues across tongues,
sipped copper stars, trying to capture the absence
of blue fields in a documentary about Apache trout.
I remember thumb wrestling for the last travel
sized toothbrush, our canteen leaking, mint toothpaste
sludge on the inside of my cheek. The horizon
was always a sterling knife over a flame, all reflection
and bleeding and premonition. You were the real painted desert,
poured cowboy aesthetics into broken glasses, and I was thinking of wire
and string. Knots and twine. I said, “There. Over there,â€
pointed, only to move and find there and there
in the light revealed on your collarbone,
and shirtless, you were cracked, too, all lines
and edges, an architect of small springs we invoked
in our fights. We will agree upon the mirages,
how we listened for Geronimo and the wind
slid against our bodies, a wetness, hydration. Our postcards
pulse with sand and cacti in daylight, words like border
and canyon pinched into a space the size of a freckle.
—Mary Stone
 Mary Stone’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Thunderclap Magazine, Hobble Creek Review, Notes Magazine, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Down in the Dirt, Mochila, and others. She received the 2011 Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She lives in Lawrence, KS, where she teaches English and co-edits the Blue Island Review. She is also a reader for Gemini Magazine.
