I run toward the mountain
like a burst of cloudless sulphurs
soon busted on a windshield, I feel like I’m dying
but dawn in May is the sky of an open womb
whose pink youth echoes in the marrow of my legs
such that I must run toward the mountain
and catch sight of the blooming Beehive cactus
which transcends its body
like a fractal from a graph, flushed and magnificent
I must catch a whiff of Lilac
before the bees have slept in her
and stolen her fragrance for the Queen
It is the month I poured from my mothers base
with jaundice and a heart murmur
so fast I must run toward that mountain,
breathless and undead, straight to the Devil
cholla who unclenches his flaming hand
into a million glochids once a year
and pierce myself to feel his tepals
to kiss his palm
I must run when low dawn reveals flecks of pyrite
I must run when the Grosbeaks arrive, singing in a fasted stupor
I must run in the onion sweat of my grandmother’s cooking
and with the tears of my father when he learned
his children would never taste her pierogis
I must run to the top of the mountain
to witness the starved desert forgive the sky
of last year’s drought with a brilliant exposé
of unfurled ovaries
appearing as flowers
and I must crouch in the dirt, so still,
to behold an Opuntia
forgiving herself
of the harm her spines may have caused;
a child’s innocent ankle, a stumbling coyote pup—
and with the tears she has collected over time,
offer her heart in the form of fruit.