Nicole Bethune Winters

there are some places that invite you to pour

yourself into them all sharp rock

and sand and cactus needles glittered

with drops of nectar where horses

are lean and wild and roam the way

they’re meant to whinnying blends

with wind and there’s a toughness

to everything the air tastes like

determination behind the hard

is sweetness the soft flesh of fruit

under a rind mica shining

in the black scales the lizard

sheds after basking at noon

the heat is a second-skin the sweat

turns to clay smeared by fingers

shaped by calluses the desert remembers

that you are 60% water and it will

suck every last drop

dry.

between waves woven

so tight they bury the

wreckage,

trust the current to breathe

you to the surface

& catch the breath in the split

second between breaks

before

brine heaves

let the salt sting,

a sky so swollen

asphyxiates, let the wind

out of your lungs

let it wail,

hammer against the bluffs,

the ocean has never been afraid

to rage.

I thought I was lucky

impervious but salt eats

away at everything        eventually and

the sandstone bluffs collapse and

twenty-nine is a landslide after heavy

rain

            a total loss the cliff

can’t rebuild but it can erode

into something

new like the sand

I am breaking

away from the rock

I was cut from

the lamp is my new favorite

it’s brass

and the whole thing gets hot when it’s been on awhile

and the lights bend and move

and it’s perfect next to the pull out bed by the fireplace

and it reminds me of the ones

in my grandparents’ house in hendersonville

where squirrels come to the porch for walnuts

where sometimes, reading in the green chair,

you can see a black bear roaming

where my sister and I used to sprint

without abandon down the golf course hill

in our swim suits while the sprinklers ran

back when catching fireflies in jars

and looking for frogs with flashlights after dark

was enough

I found one that still had a tail, once

not a tadpole, but not fully a frog

caught between one thing

and the other.