Writing Spaces

What better place to write the desert landscape, rock and bone and light?






image:  Georgia O'Keeffe House, Architectural Digest

Carrying Chili from the Desert

I lift out of a bed of swaddling shirts

the packages of red chili

I’ve brought out of the desert

like religious relics

to cook with garlic and oregano,

cumin, round steak.  It is a ritual

I learned from my Norwegian mother,

well beyond her blasphemy by now,

the quitting of her people

who exalted the pale purity of butter and

sang Onward, Christian Soldiers as a single voice.

I will grind the pods, feeling the burn

of the red skin and seeds on my fingers—

their rasp when dry like desert snakes

a kind of phantom pain, the sting

that is remembering hers those last years,

on her own in the stark foreign land

far from the dairies of Wisconsin,

the mild sloe-eyed butter cows,

that finds its way into whatever I write now.

A kind of holy writ

with fire at its heart, fed on the tinder

of the cottonwood crosses the Penitentes bear.

—Christie