This next one is called "Saguaros."
"Blythe rises in welts.
It pinches California and my mother,
the menstruating horizon between the two.
Thus it was with her.
She a cloud, long and placed perfectly.
Sky strong and full of torn cornflower blue.
Before me, the babies were born as still and silent as mercury,
a victory for her when her field caught seed
and bloomed startlingly open.
I was born in a dry world and we lived as chasms among men.
Saguaros with hundreds of years holding rain, the same,
in a sense, as wild beasts in battle who want for water.
We were mistaken in taking from the cracked ground,
brown and spent.
Forget men.
We were better off withholding.
I tell you this because she's gone now,
and you are a kind and forgiving reader, seeking truth.
For truth, I say, I remember this mother,
the mother of my nights, bringing home a jackrabbit,
pulling a tooth trap from its pelage to slit the pregnant
belly, knowing the body to be a stasis and the desert a hell,
and the knife the only bridge between the two."