Finalist – 2025 James H. Nash Contest

desertification poem

by OLIVER

when you have come to look at disaster
with something like logic

everything has deserted you
but a fear of death

you look out into the desert
and you only see metaphors
for your own
what?

for you? you alone
doubling into a landscape
of forgetfulness

you went to the desert to remember
something once and you
forgot it all

and that strange bird
or was it a butterfly
or a moth
it came to find you

I came to find you there too
I steered by the position
of the sun in the sky
holding my fists up to count
the hours

until the coyotes came with their hunger
and my weeping meant nothing to them
because I am fundamentally
a piece of meat

walking the earth inventing
metaphors for myself
like the desert
 
         ***

I found you

with blood in
my vision
all bloodied
all red

you pissed on my
wounds

your face was
as perfect as
the pink
stone walls

I grasped it
in my dirty hands

         ***

deserted:

a number of people leave a place causing it to appear empty

         ***

a dry barren area of land

         ***

we cried out her
name a hundred times
to the moon

while the sand stole
the heat from our
bodies

while we felt the
pulses of
each thing dying

we cried out her name
into my pulsing wounds

we cried and I said
        maybe you can eat me
        if things get really dire

we laughed

---

OLIVER is a writer, scholar, performance artist, farmer, student, reader, eater, sleeper, ecosexual, homosexual, transsexual, metrosexual, good-for-nothing, good-for-everything, dyke, et cetera. They are a soon-to-be graduate of the theater and performance studies MA at WashU, where they recently completed their thesis on the life and work of Cathy Josefowitz. They were almost born on a boat in San Francisco Bay.