Alison Hicks

Saguaro National Monument

A small wind rises up.
Creatures hiding from the day emerge:
birds winging cactus to cactus,
insects unburrow, drone in the air.

Orange and red leach,
shapes shortening in the drop-off.
Authority turning over
from sky to earth.

Eyes we can’t see.
Hunting time: when things with legs
and even the giant saguaros themselves maybe
rouse themselves and move around.

We train on the blossoming
of a star, and the others that follow,
air so thin they shower on us,
pass the thermos until the wine is gone.

Sand cool now under feet,
we turn to the city, our home
on a neon horizon.

• • •

Pain in the Neck

Crick traveling down

Hitch in the latch

Radioactive ticktock
on which muscle reclines & complains

Won’t be kneaded & needled out
stretched, medicated
into submission

Tunnels into tissue deeper
where memory adds to its minefield

Animal’s instinctive tensing
before apocalypse

first to take the hit

in a building that never burns
fire alarm ringing

waiting for the flame
to catch & spread

• • •

The Aurochs

I had been kept in darkness,
had not eaten in some days.
When they brought me out into the hall,
men were feeding the blaze on the floor.
It hurt my eyes; I squinted, turned away.

They gave me the drink. I climbed up,
lay on my back on the frame they had constructed.
Light traveled, unfolding over stone.
I reached my hand to meet the wall and waited.

They showed themselves first as tremors
barely detectable below my fingers,
growing as they came on,
until the sound of their hooves was a roar.

I stretched to brush their flanks
and as they passed they became visible to me,
and I marked them as they came on, their pendant bellies,
tapered horns, their noses, knobby legs.

They ran through the rock.
To make others see, I marked them.

• • •