Sunset Riots
The desert has long been imagined as empty—a space of silence, exile, or waiting. But these poems speak to its surplus: its memory, its history, its sacred density. This series traces a personal and spiritual journey across the American Southwest, moving through deserts not as voids, but as thresholds between life and death, vision and ritual, earth and sky.
Each site: Big Water, La Paloma, Agua Fría, Mesa Verde, Arcosanti holds a story. These are not only geographic points but portals, where the body becomes porous and the landscape becomes a participant in transformation. Across the series, Indigenous cosmologies, seasonal cycles, and mythic architectures rise through the text: Kivas emerge beneath Lake Powell, hummingbirds cross from flower world to dreamscape, the sun strikes like prophecy, and stones preserve the soul.
The poems follow an arc: descent into underworlds and catacombs, ascent through mountains and heat, return through ritual. Here, the desert is a map of emergence. It scalds and rewires. It breaks, embalms, resurrects.
To walk this terrain is to be unmade, then rewoven.
Big Water (Grand Escalante, Utah | September 2021)
This poem begins after a flood, in a moment of stillness charged with memory and metal. It reflects on the temptation of decay and permanence, the scrapyard as monument, before redirecting toward ritual renewal. The desert is a layered landscape: a site of burial and emergence. Spider Grandmother, from Pueblo cosmology, weaves connection through rocks and steps, mapping ancestors onto the land. What begins as desolation opens into textile, sound, and kiva, a portal into another world, another self.
After the deluge dries up,
The dead rise.
The Sun on the horizon
Begins casting down light
Tawa creating deep purple skies
That drown out
the flickering artificial rites
Off and on they speak and stand
Growing tired of them, I strike
making my way down the desert left and right
Like lighting up camp and into a sea of old metal
Broken and shining the pieces burn as they rust
Rumblings inside me wonder If I should join them
Become a scrapyard centerpiece and bask in the
Sun forever-
But I head back home
The next day we climb
Up rocks shaped like clouds
Telar mappings
Tying together our shared stories
and turning them into this interrelated story of self
We retrace our steps on this web
Climbing we cross-stitch
On the shoulders of our ancestors
Spider grandmother
Guiding us through this transition and into textile creation
we are commanded to fall
Face down
And listen to the fabric of life
to the legends and the voices
Of the spirits, of the rock
I could be this, become a stone
A small, rocky formation for others
on the path
to self-discovery but
Come nightfall we sing and dance
in the darkness
Our traces become a footstep collage on this flat plateau
Someone begins
Plucking guitar strings under moonlight
I could be this, vibrating to the touch
Producing melodies into sound and space, but
finally Under Lake Powell
A Kiva emerges
Centered and grounded out from it comes
A portal inside
Sipapu
Transporting us Into the second world
Once insects
we emerge
La Paloma( Tucson, Arizona | September 2022)
Set in the shadow of Tohono O’odham cosmology, this poem is a movement through desert as labyrinth and cathedral. From catacombs to mountaintop, the speaker undergoes spiritual transformation through ritual exertion and offering. Saguaros, red-tailed hawks, and torchwood serve not as symbols but as guides. The dance of the hummingbird, sacred in the Yaqui tradition, becomes a link between worlds. The “curse” breaks when memory becomes shrine, and the desert once treacherous yields to reverence.
Through catacombs
And down dark corners
I see sudden death
This passage has proven to be slowly dilating,
revealing a circulatory
ambulation as it continues to unwind and
Untangle as I begin to split and reach for
Dead ends
Cutting off corners and stock characters
Uncertain but centered
Cachetic but unwavering-
I pant and push onward,
Windedly reaching
the center of the maze leading to Se-He
The Sun God stands as he gives me Himdag
Giving me the present of balance
I get to gratitude and lacking patience-
immediately reach for exaltation
-
From
Perennial Saguaros
Peninentally I climb up I'itoi mountain:
A peregrination of switchbacks
Through woody scents of
torchwood copal shrub
And pinyon pine
holding the rocks for
Counterbalances as I seek to stay steady, a journey of
Contriteful harkenings for things as they once were
And hawks with colorful red-tails.
But hoping to return the gift and
Offer a prayer of rain for the future:
I begin to dance with the hú of the hummingbird
as it bobs and weaves through the crowd,
Moving towards sunflower petals tossed in the sky
I reach for and catch this swift semalukut
From Sewa Ania
Into Tenku Ania he has come
Out of the flower world and deep into our dreams
Reveries turn terrors in this hazy sonoran desert as
Reminiscent mirages apparate
From the whippering dust they begin to
Whisper abound
Tormental mementos
until they wind-down
back to their sepulchures-
a curse set, now broken
Memories honored become shrines
And fade back into the ground,
leaving the second world-
And the labyrinth behind.
Agua Fría (Santa Fe, New Mexico | October 2023)
This poem channels the force of Awanyu, the plumed serpent and water guardian in Tewa belief. Water sculpts, cuts, and consecrates. The storm initiates a descent through snow, serpentine thunder, and eventually into the body itself. As water runs, it etches transformation, the zigzag wounds of purification. The desert’s dryness is shattered by water’s persistence, and the speaker, like the land, is reshaped and remade.
Traveling by tramway
Up reddish hues and sharp cliffs
We rock back and forth tracing the
Path of the lighting sky
We land just as a storm comes upon us
Cold water begins to slow
And starts to harden as
Serpentine thunder slithers and strikes
Cracking
snow begins to pound the pavement
Suddenly it proves successful and I begin to fall with it
Past trees and rocky edges
down the Rio Grande
Embarking on this water journey of the soul
The plumed serpent,
Awanyu,
begins to guide us
It becomes the rivers and creeks
Water stumbling and siphoning
over embankments under
Currents carving into me sharply
leaving zig zags
They cut and I bleed
Slowly blending into
The ruddy landscape
Washing down and away
And becoming anew
Agua Caliente( Palm Springs, California | April 2024)
This piece explores hot springs as portals: sites where earth cracks open to release memory and medicine. It invokes the Cahuilla cosmology of Sec-he, whose sacred water scalds and heals. The spring becomes a chemical ritual: dendritic paths, chalky embalming, mimicry of roots under skin. Like clay shaped by heat, the speaker is curated by the land and made still. This is a preservation ritual, where the body does not burn away, but becomes still enough to hold knowledge.
The sun shines and Sungrey strikes down
Ground faults creating openings
Sprouting lines out like branches
Arboreal portals into the unknown
Where roots get crossed and
rocks can finally meet
Sec-he creating cracks so
This hot spring can sting
Can shock
A Season of reemergence:
The sound of gentle deep waters rising to the surface:
Spring everlasting
Overpowering and rewiring
Resets only the nukatem can provide
Beings made of earth and clay
With curatorial powers
selecting the self needing renewal
And extracting the rest-
Elevating hot water pouring inside
Embalming and encasing the body
Chalky chemicals and acidic
Solutions flow deep into my veins
Sticks that mimic and map
the dendritic paths of the opening
Under the skin they fill it like a mold
Until I sit still, preserved.
A Desert Zionide ( Zion National Park, Utah | August 2024)
This poem stages a messianic gathering, where landscape becomes liturgy. Tents form stars, mountains become altars, and water becomes covenant. Drawing on Jewish mysticism, Sinawava legend, and desert ecology, the poem questions judgment and retribution through the lens of rock shaped by time. As the pilgrim ascends, they encounter the paradox of strength and softness. cactus spines and water flows until Angels Landing becomes a place of arrival and erosion. It’s both a revelation and a release
We emerge
Out of Tents set up through standing rituals creating
Hexagonal shapes like stars above
We move in and out like accordions
Offering up prayers and taking them in return
Creating and casting shadows on the mountain
This Double-sided longing
The mirror creation of revolution
A story of redemption and return
Of messianic visions on the importance
of connection
Of reverence creating returns to senders
And revelations of the need for each other
Up the mountain we go
Without hubris, but harping on humility
We hold on and climb to the promised land
Light unto nations being given to us not by man
But by sun
Shekinah is with us
For we are all Zimris’ before we become Zealots
Acting not as Pinchas but understanding the innate
Permeability of rock as still but shaped by water and time
Like the ferns around us
Thriving in rocky, shaded, and unexpected places
We climb
The Cacti spine sewing and tattooing into us like
Sinawava molding the caves and rocks we climb on
Leaving behind a people embalmed, encased, and turned to stone
To Angels Landing we arrive
And down and onto the next we go
We pass our friends and
Rush into freezing water
Shaping rock as it breaks us
We start bracing and wading
Deeper Into the narrows
We follow the river as it moves us
Waiting for a resolution, finding none.
We fall as it takes us in
The heaviness of water carried
As we walk with it
We reach a waterfall,
Stand below, and begin to thaw
Mesa Verde ( Cortez, Colorado | September, 2024)
Set during the fall equinox, this poem dwells in balance and distortion in between shadow and clarity, memory and myth. The ancient cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde are not abandoned; they are watching. Spirits of the land remain suspended, holding the line between cycles. The poem moves from harvest to withdrawal, from moonlight to kiva, and into the fourth world of Hopi emergence. It’s a space of warning: that overreach and forgetting the land's rhythm leads to imbalance and wintering.
Fall Equinoxes
When clouds obscure skies
and sketch chiaroscuros for us
Where the elements
Light and shadow
Dry us up and
draw us down
Turning us and taking us
Into the third dimension
Speaking volume yet seeing
early freezes and false falls
Balance given to us yet
we seek to
Lock horns but -
Learning from elders we realize to
Lie in the in-between until instructed for
Lest we become the
Men once thought themselves gods
With once sunny pasts
Now gathered like daggers
From the harvests we reaped
On the cliff palace above
Spirits sit there still
Watching the
full moons come out of the eastern
Mesas filled with longing to listen
But unable to move
Of land that will release you out of balance
and into winter
From harvests and dances we close out kivas
Kachinas guiding us towards darkness
And into the fourth world
The Prophet in the Desert( Arcosanti, Arizona | October, 2024)
This final poem becomes a desert prophecy set in Paolo Soleri’s experimental city, where architecture and ecology aim to unify. The desert teaches through heat, rhythm, and return. The prophet is not alone, they are enmeshed, knotted in land, wire, spirit. Rituals of heaving, dancing, and sound reawaken what was buried. From here, a fifth world opens not built from invention, but from balance, release, and sound restored.
We begin the journey on foot
Down paths lit by scattered string lights at nightfall
Strewn through long roads
Cross-stitched by iron stakes in the ground
Creating infinite squares
Cardines e decumani
Stretching up and across the fields
Cobwebs hang above us
Tellers of the unseen
Electricity coursing through currents
Cutting and crossing us
Wiring not around us, but within us
Through us,
And back to them
A double-knotted consciousness forms
And away from tightrope we walk
Away from the humming of electricity
From the worldly thunder that strikes far away
Into the heat we move
Heat rising from black seas of oil
Rendering this place thermal.
The Furnace of desert life producing energy
As the gods beat down upon our brow
We come to understand
Paolo Santeri’s perfect miscalculation
Like the men before him
Turned to stone and spirit
Creating an arc-ology that planned for the shadow of the sun
While neglecting to account for our own
While neglecting to account for our own
But when we let the sun shine upon us
When we sit and pause
Sweat tracing our backs
We lie down and meditate
reconnect with the cliff behind us.
Sonic waves engulf us
Forty days condense to four
Rhythmically in the listening room where visions soften and
Time turns inside out of us and colors within us
Like the Yavapai shamans felt
The land provides for those who listen.
We begin to rebuild,
Remembering this
enmeshed techno-cognition, an
ergo sum continuum that was present before
Not a concealing that had
Tools not for us or by us
But were always with us
Learning to release our minds like our lands
When we realized they were the counterweights
Returning to us what was uneven in ourselves
We bring this balance back through dancing
Through rituals of heaving
Through drums echoing in the cave
Bodies rhythmically moving and stomping
We scream
Our prayers become the stewards of our future
We go onto the roof and peer up at the sky
Looking through long tubes and into blue stars
Where shared wires will once cross and high voltages cause
Sparks to fly, shine, and fall
Off celestial bodies and bounced into a revealing
Purifying our path forward
Out of the fourth world
And into the fifth