The House of Roy

Data ruined my fictions and my fixations. The air,
this side of the North Rim,
feels edible.

I found a barstool sitting upright in a wash and I’ll be damned if it don’t fit.

Whiskey barrels don’t last too long out here in the screaming sands,
with that morning wind and that march of the red brome.
Not like they do in the rancid and damp gardens of the south end.
And neither do hope chests when left unattended,
flimsy at their hinges and in their charge.
But wood paneling does just fine,
fine enough to secure steer horns and cattle skulls
and flaking carcasses of any and all Wonder Valley Antelope...

I’m counting grounded crows.
I’m counting the minutes left in the life of this century plant and its tragic bloom.

The corral is too small for anything but standing on one leg.

Even a fence isn’t a good long-term solution for a fence.

There are coils in the sand around the House of Roy,
snake trails, likely,
or the beautiful convulsions of a dying thing
dragging itself to some safe place to recover,
which it likely will not.

The burrowing flies of the House of Roy are manic,
frantic for the new verse,
but it’s only a Tuesday
and there’s a whole mess of day left.

The boulders stack like steeples and it’s all predator and prey down in the wash.
The blood of the host
gets lapped up quick and cheap by the sand.

Joshua Trees don’t budge, not in this kinda heat,
and the ancient tin cans mouth off like they are
part of the catastrophe.

No one’s a monolith, say the hitching posts.

Sometimes nightfall feels like it’s yelling at you,
say the monoliths.

The birds see the bad in all of us,
the biosphere of trauma,
and they can tell my father taught me how to siphon gas
and they say this is providence
for people like y’all.