Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash
by Allison Field Bell
The way a cactus can retain pounds of liquid to sustain itself and the poison of the slow-moving gila monster, its neon orange stripes a warning. She tells me about the tarantula hawk—its sick hanging legs, and how it targets its prey, a spider three times its mass, a deception, a sting, and then the injection of eggs into the still-living body. She tells me she misses me, the way I wear my shirts tucked into too-tight jeans and the fact that I drink too much bourbon at night, every night. It was never going to work, she says. Her body and mine: too many states away, too much past between us, nothing looking like future. I say, I want you anyways: your jawline working through its ongoing question of us, your hands on my hipbones, all your lives in all your deserts.
Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. Find her words at allisonfieldbell.com.
