Words With Landscape

1. Llorona

The rabbit brush is what locates us

on the lateral side of what, in Spanish, is an acequia
and, in English, a drainage ditch.
It’s hard not to have a preference
between language’s two tines for the same place.

The monsoon soaks the chamisa
bright as dill in homemade pickles.

Brickled stones dot the river bed,
threaded in grit and wise as a milk gap,
where only Woodhouse’s toads gather anyway,
shaded, in and among the cheeseweed.

The two distant nighthawks that angle swiftly for insects
(and were recently displaced by multitudes of …