December Light in Arizona

Melissa Cundieff-Pexa


 

We were in the cemetery again,
a fever rising in us like some bright
horizon. The headstone names around us
fooled you into thinking we weren’t so
dangerously alone, filling ourselves
with red wine and the cruel, heavy sound
of truck horns. I said the highway looked
for all the world like bone, an arm outstretched
forever across the dust. Our eyes burned
from looking. The dark nooks of our ears filled
with birdsong, then silence, then, remember?
You fell into one of those empty graves
and almost broke with your perfect body
the sky’s horrendous, vacant mirror.