Poetry Submission

Beauty

There is nowhere to hide

in the desert, under the full moon,

in the blue light that pours

through the body like water.

It as if we are born again

in the open air, to feel our bare

skin against the world for the first time.

And from here, eyes untethered,

we see a different kind of beauty

that lives underneath the surface—

that quivers in the thorns

and breaks out of the volcanic rock

like a song you hear in a dream,

when your mind has gone quiet.

To meet this kind of beauty,

make a slow approach,

a spiral walk to the center.

Leave offerings. Show up

in the odd hours of the night—

then she may let you see her fur,

her sharp teeth, the flash

of her pale underbelly.

For this beauty moves in the spaces—

in the interior of things, in the rivulets

of a dry land that rarely sees rain,

in the seed that blooms once in a hundred years,

in the sap of a Joshua tree lifting

its arms, heavy with blooms, to the piercing stars.

This beauty leaves you weeping

in the blue of the moonlight

with nowhere to hide.