At night when his body is folded on the bed, and his back
is turned—I’ll start a poem in my head: We stay up. / I watch
his back curved / and shoulders arced / like desert dunes—
Desert dunes. I walk through it in my head. Into the heat.
Hardly shifting / as he breathes. Desert dunes,
the dry air blowing ridges in the sand. Grand as the stones
moving in its valleys. Desert dunes, a deep beige beneath
blue steel skies. I disappear into it—the dunes, the back,
before the words dry up. Desert dunes: Later he lays
flat, / sleeping like a body, his body / and I see the freckles
now / on the same skin and bones / that stood mountainous.
Desert dunes. The words tire and crumple like a jackrabbit
in the pocks of dunes—cool and unmoving, its ruffled planes
disturbed only by this animal crawling quiet in the dark.
      

This poem previously appeared in the December 2015 issue of Clementine Unbound.