ceremony

by Will Cordeiro

we’d driven past the burnt-out chapter house

abandoned trailer homes &

badlands

which scaled off into a dry lake

called The Crack amid the pale chaparral near Luepp

a godforsaken rez dog barking on its chain

the boarding school that doubled as internment camp.

a rusted truss bridge straddles the arroyo—

graveled cholla

& mustardweed

dust-blown floodplains dimpled with yellowcake

down a washboard sand road

we pulled off the shoulder

& parked

dark blood

of cliffside boulders—pink clouds

blitzed along its rift

noonday holds

nerve-fibers

blanking out

a brooding spider’s slinking by

the light inside each quartzite grain

hunched banks of leeward dune creep bunchgrass

beveled inscapes

gaping with glass shards

charred pipes

&

cookware

each scattered remnant

from last year’s drought…

we looked at bleached owl bones

black tiger beetles

crawling over coneflowers under the raw outstretched blue cleareyed dome

we saw, so near it was within us,

one blossom rooted in a crumbled skull

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Will Cordeiro has work published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.