By Jemma Leigh Roe

––after Natalie Diaz

I thought I would not live until the end of that summer

feeding on the creosotic air and the turquoise sky

when I thought the body was imaginary

when I thought that love was real.

But the monsoon came in September

to flood the arroyo where I deserted

my body night after night.

The coyotes who wandered on the mountain descended

and stayed up with me to watch

the silent sun rise from my sluggish heart,

rise through my dry-stricken throat that stung

like scorpion weed with blooms of amethyst stones

I wore to protect myself.

Only then, I felt the river flow through my veins

pulsing in the chaste aridity, beating the never-ending heat

during that summer of wildfires

when a white-tailed deer bowed before it and drank

ignoring the hunter’s gun

when I died in the brush

and came back to life.

Jemma Leigh Roe studied art at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and received a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her poems and artwork appear in The Ilanot Review, The Fourth River, Thin Air, Canyon Voices, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and others. www.jemmaleighroe.com