Words of Acadiana

  Morning comes softly to Alamogordo. The Sacramento Mountains emerge from sleep one shadow at a time, their ridges gathering light like old memories returning to the body. A thrasher splashes in the bird bath. Water lifts. Water falls. The sound is small enough to be mistaken for a prayer. The desert says nothing. Creosote. Dust. Stone. The long language of things that survive. I stand among ghosts I once called myself. The child who dreamed of elsewhere. The man who carried too much. The lives that fit for a season and then loosened, slipping away like old skin. The earth keeps them all. Every day I walk in a quiet funeral. No black clothes. No hymns. Only sunlight moving across gravel. Only wind lifting the corners of memory. Only the endless procession of what has ended making room for what has not yet begun. The mountains brighten. The thrasher climbs from the water and vanishes into the mesquite. Nothing announces itself. Still, something is happening. The wind moves through ...

  I buried a version of myself without flowers I buried a version of myself without flowers No casseroles cooling on church tables No black umbrellas opening like wounds Just the desert wide as forgiveness and the long ache of wind moving through dry grass like someone whispering my old name for the last time I carried him carefully The man who learned how to survive by becoming useful beautiful enough quiet enough wanted enough to remain invited into rooms that never loved him back I folded his shirts like prayer flags I thanked him for keeping me alive through fifty years of highways and motel mirrors of love that arrived hungry and left before morning of standing perfectly still while entire worlds were built on top of him I loved him mostly That is the hardest part Not every life deserves escape Some deserve mourning So I walked him out past the last gas station past the skeletal fences past the mountains that look bruised at sunset The desert did not ask questions It only open...

  Bathwater Blues II (Holy Water Heartbeat) (Verse 1) I still check in under fake names Still light cigarettes off motel saints Still leave the TV talking low Like somebody might come home Amarillo’s all lavender twilight Truck stop angels and porch-light eyes And I wear your memory loose now Like your flannel falling off my side There’s rosary beads around the lamp shade Lip print kisses on a Styrofoam cup You’re somewhere west of Tucumcari Probably smoking with your boots kicked up (Chorus) Still the best damn bath in the Amarillo Motel 6 Steam rising slow like a prayer on my lips Radio static and the ice machine crying While I replay your hands on my thighs in silence Baby, love used to feel like a roadside crucifix All blood red heartbreak and beautiful tricks But now the water glows soft in the neon mist And I don’t feel lonely in it (Verse 2) There’s a motel Bible by the shampoo packets Your name folded inside like a secret habit Page marked somewhere near forgiveness Though ...

  They met on a line stretched thin between worlds— not quite earth, not quite sky, just a humming place where things feel permanent until they don’t. Two men, balanced in the same fragile moment, shoulders almost touching, pretending the current beneath them was something like fate. It buzzed through their bones— that dangerous kind of closeness, the kind that feels like home before you’ve checked the foundation. He learned the shape of him slowly— the way his laughter cut through silence, the way his eyes held distance even when he leaned in, like a horizon that never stopped moving. They never named it. Just let it live there— on that wire, between heartbeat and hesitation, between what was spoken and what stayed trembling in the throat. Some loves don’t bloom. They hover. They exist in the almost— in late nights that stretch too far, in hands that almost reach, in glances that land and then look away like they’ve seen too much. And maybe he knew. Maybe somewhere in the quiet, h...