"Dominant orientation lights a corridor
wide as Mexico's northern border.
Upon return, everything left was unopened,
consumed by humans, destroyed by humans, or animalized.
One hopes the bees hiving, dying
in foul smelling clumps, are not Africanized.
The increasing aftermath of invasion.
The wounds,
amber overtaken near lovely in the morning.
The first recorded dead remained unidentifiable to the officers.
Lost to exposure.
What to do with a Negro in the desert.
Or all of them after.
In dry orchards out of season.
Among cotton.
Saguaro picked by wrens.
Exposure precedes the realization
of an identity or fact.
State of being exposed to contact with something else.
Even when making very little noise.
The soldiers.
Pissing behind creosote.
Or elegant on their horses lined to enter the corral.
Entering each morning before the mountain silhouettes.
A cold hand to unlace the erroneous
and unfortunately pussing stitch.
The hand incorporated along emotional fields of decay.
The chain cholla fruit, then fall.
Soil in Sonora softens according to the rain.
Offering every explanation in full.
Without saying shit.
Without gentleness or stepping back from the officers' science.
Or from how white supremacist they really are.
At the center of the explanation sits a small box.
And to this box the beetle larvae arrive to feed.
Among legal understandings of natural life in the United
States is the sentence.
As in, for the length of one's natural life.
(There, standing.
The distance of their body to a door
cracked alone in the desert.
Irrefutable music.)
The sentence of natural life, unlike the sentence of life,
doesn't allow for the possibility of parole.
Which was anyway discontinued in Arizona in 1993
when the possibility of parole was
replaced with that of release.
A process which remains judicially vague.
Among peoples in the United States,
Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at the highest
rates per capita.
Among Blacks, the carceral industry
(regardless the branching of orchards and centuries of trees)
finds its critical mass.
Every sentence harbors a unique end.
That is its gift.
Night opens a jagged scar.
Soft purple signals the end of night in Southern Arizona.
Tree frogs retreat in the depths of winter.
Their bodies appear lifeless.
As do certain moths that avoid internal freezing
by purging their guts.
After the last music.
A man, then unidentified,
found fully fleshed; condition code one.
From which water flows north.
Probable electrocution located in a database of migrant deaths.
His coordinates crossed by desert jaguars
reliant on streams.
His coordinates are passed through the beetles'
gentle bowels.
And those of the Bell's vireo.
Identified by a two-part structure.
His definitive response and water down his slender,
grayed breast.
Beneath the cottonwood's gold filtered crown.
Where the lowland leopard frog remains moist.
The large cat's paw print remains fresh in the soil.
After the last music.
Tubman and Whitney hike Brown Canyon.
They spot a rare beardless tyrannulet
(did she appear from nowhere?)
hugging parched northern boundaries of her species range.
A Mexican jaguar treads backward to observe
her melancholic refrain.
It's without their interest that the Department of Interior
studies effects of stress and fire on vegetation
via high rise, high res, satellite phenomics.
No two droughts are alike.
The earliest Negro recorded dead in Arizona was unidentified.
Having not survived probable hypothermia.
Exposure.
Blunt force.
Force accumulates behind the skull
to bear centuries of afterlife and pulp.
The afterlife of being chatteled.
Of being made a glorified mercenary or buffoon.
Hanging naked in the moon's light.
Where there is no substitute for the adjunct feeling.
Coerced into foul smelling clumps.
Let's say the force requires a hand.
Or an industry.
At whatever temperature.
More land.
Let's say some records are not good.
Or, the pulp is blooming.
And the hands they return not destroyed exactly
but smelling lonely and of death."