DESERT BED
The alkaline white histories are as permanent as anyone gets, bone
pure, salt cured, and the bike rides like a hot spider on the back of a burning
deck, and all the sea is white cream fire, and the outskirts of Las Vegas
recede into the blood of evening, a McCarthy trick that leaves you thinking
this apocalypse is an old century, and singularity your necessity, skirting
Badwater, only to be extinguished by the skillet heat of the desert, any time,
night or day, Jurassic or primeval prehistory, basket days, Sweet Grass or
Hupa, the darkness suffocates, and you climb downward into Furnace Creek, into
the raw subterrain of another volcanic aftermath, tümpisa, a rock paint region defined on the maps by its ability to
exorcise even the more persistent ghosts, and you wonder why that little guy in
the only store for a hundred miles doesn’t charge a ten spot at the door, air
cooled by what seem the insidious machines of the future, here in the heart of
enemy earth, the tires bubbling like fresh batter on the black macadam, and
there is no way you can stand, let alone sleep, the scorpions sizzling, the
darkness a monster, it teeth the iron heat, and so, weary as a dead man walking
the hundred mile stretch a hundred years before, you climb up the slow valley
toward the heaven of funeral hills and another desert, this one out of the
post-apocalyptic, this one simmering in the rains and artesian blessings that
have refused to die in heat beneath, this water-rock desert in its rough sand
blasts of spring, a place where the light is not absorbed, and time does not
stop, and at last in the purer darkness of starlight you can sleep.
* George Moore lives in Colorado. He writes “I've been interested in the prose poetry here on the IS&T site for awhile, but am just now thinking I might have something that fits the criteria. Although I'm not familiar enough with the flash distinctions you mention, I think what I do basically merges the language of prose and poetry, and I've had some luck with pieces over the last few years. I like mostly here what I've seen of the prose poems and flash fictions in early April. In any case, I thought I'd submit. Last year I had poems published internationally, in the States, England, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Iceland, France and Singapore. I have published poems in Diode, ditch, Zone, Bathhouse, Blast, Cafe Irreal, Anastomoo, Apparatus, Eclectica, Fact-Similie, Cortland Review, and also The Colorado Review, North American Review, Orion, Queen's Quarterly, Dublin Quarterly, Antigonish Review. I was nominated last year and this year again for a Pushcart Prize, and two Best of the Web prizes, and this year for The Rhysling Poetry Award. My most recent collections are an e-book All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits 2007) and Headhunting (Mellen, 2002).