CONDEMNED

I wake up some mornings and write about the edge of the Valley. There, shade hunkers beneath awnings of surplus stores selling scrap, gas-masks, and ripped tarpaulin. The desert pulls skin over skull, and stretches out its chaparral skin of railroad tracks, fields the dun of dry turd flecked with burr. I write about the last warehouse, cinder-blocks the gray of boiled mutton, the last billboard for malt liquor. And by writing, I hear the thrum of the interstate, and the growl decrescendo of trucks hauling frozen beef beneath the unblinking sun, and all the cars abandoning this region where air is stagnant. By writing about this threshold to the desert, I find myself on a sidewalk leading to the last house on a block where sand serrates the wind crackling like a needle pacing the outermost groove of an L.P. I stagger, eyes clenched in the heat, one arm shielding my gaze, the other akimbo, and I mount warped steps, open the splintered door, and slam it shut,—beams shaking, foundation sinking an inch.

For Robert Lopez, denizen