Did you ever think
You’d drown in the desert?

An artist’s palette
Paints the Valley of Death
With vibrant, verdant
Sediment.

A living boulder
Guided in the night
By an unseen shepherd
Pauses-
Having carved us a racetrack

Walking on salt flats with eggshell feet.
So neither will crack
Like a smile, like the corner of your mouth
Chapped against my wasteland face.

Trapped in a basin of Badwater
We look up from the parched space
Below sea level
And give a raw laugh

For if the water rolled in
We’d drown.

—

Arah McManamna is a recent graduate from UCLA pursuing a career as a grant writer. She has been previously published in Student Voices and Cactus Heart Press.