Words of Acadiana

  My eyes hold the Western sun   Not the fire-just the ending When everything has come undone  Gold bleeding into dust  After descending shades of rust Like a promise never mending You said “forever” in the dusk  Like it wasn’t already leaving Like the dark don’t follow light  Like I wouldn’t keep believing  Now I’m walking into silence  Where the sky don’t say my name  Where the earth don’t call it love  Just burns it down all the same  You were a storm without a center  I was water you outrun  Now I’m blooming in the desert  Underneath this dying sun  You lit me up like something sacred  The disappeared without a trace  Left your echoes in my body  Like a ghost without a face  But the wind out here is honest  It won’t beg and it won’t stay  It just carves away the past  ‘Til there’s nothing left to say  So I’m breathing in the silence  Letting heat undo my bones...

  She walks where the earth has forgotten softness— a cathedral of fracture and bone-dry prayer, cracked clay splitting like old confessions no one dared to speak aloud. A desert witch, hair tangled with the slow grief of melting glaciers, ancient ice weeping into strands of silver and salt— memory of oceans she has never seen, yet feels in her blood like a rumor. Ravens circle where nothing should live, black ink against a merciless sky, their wings writing omens she pretends not to read. Beneath her feet, a throbbing— not of the land, but of longing, a rhythm buried deep in the marrow of things, calling her downward, inward, toward something hidden or something lost. She presses her palms into the dust, whispers to it like a lover gone cold. Sigils bloom beneath her fingers, etched in trembling lines— circles, spirals, broken symbols of want. Sage smoke curls from her mouth, not exhale, but invocation. She breathes the past into the present, lets it sting her eyes until she can a...