Issue #31, February, 2003 : -- -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 8 -9 -10 -11 -12
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Connie Voisine

Prayer to New Mexico My fifth new home-- the sun-scorched highway from the airport so bright it is its own source of wandering, past the dairy yards full of cows and their groans, to this brown, desert plateau, to cacti and the Rio Grande, that ochre stew of runoff, silt, and weedkiller. Blessed be my newest stranger-next-door, furtive behind his blinds, whose smallish dog, named for a liqueur, does not like me, her constant bark an excuse I will use at night for my own insomniac paces. Porous, dark purple neighbor in the wooze of a cop show filmed live all over America, I know you feel the grief of crack whores and their arresting officers, but don't really wonder about this woman next door--you know your place in these pages of lament we call the world. Blessed fifth new try, déjàvu of I-don't-know, can I bear the bite of insects from the holes in yet another rented screen? Noontimes that soap the strip malls to a white glare? The three kings followed something crazy as a burning knot of star, lugged their boxes of exotica towards the unknown, an immigration made simpler by desire, and so I pray. Here you measure rain in careful eighths. The air is thin and old. I hang clothes that will dry and scorch, while my lucky neighbor sits as he often does in his minivan, smokes, blasts Mexican radio where every D.J. is a revelator megawatt-strong and I'm straining to understand. There's a vertigo of blue at the seam of the wall and the sky. Wind skirmishes the dust and all the neighborhood dogs, shocked, chase dry thunder from their yards.

Wooden Watertank. Marfa, Texas Jessica Powers larger version of image

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Issue #31, February, 2003 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.