“The Temperance (XIV) Card

“Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzards
supping on a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a
Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish clouds
gathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck.
A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines,
shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believe
is the one you'll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man
at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods
speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south.
You might say this about exile, mountains eroded by
six hundred years of women's feet, the heavy press
from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south,
mothers find their daughters' bodies in boxes.
The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigo
against the black land, as monstrously beautiful
as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names
the dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm.”