dry wash

letting saguaros

point the way

 

My ex-boyfriend and I, the one my grandfather had urged me to marry, spent a month together in the Buckskin Mountains in southwestern Arizona, transecting layers of bedrock for his senior thesis. In separate sleeping bags, we camped alongside a wash that flooded during thunderstorms. At night grey foxes would bang around our pots and pans. I’d lie awake for hours, terrified by the loud, strange brays of feral burros from somewhere in the dark. Each morning: new patterns of rocks, fresh sets of tracks.

 

cholla spines

the mating red-tails

drift apart