her name was arizona, the blossoming cactus goddess and the keeper of the red sands. the sun-bleached bones of the wanderers ached for her to press her heat against them, leaving a film of dust on their skin and burns on their feet. she sang with the howl of coyotes who catch turquoise dreams in rusty, copper fur. she was gritty and her teeth were sharp, but there was a gentleness to her savagery in the salt of a drying nosebleed, the slow and leisurely trickle of red river onto chapped lips. with sweeps of burning fingers she scratched sunsets that lulled the lucid into tumultuously unfolding dreams. the mesas were temples to her prickly purple kaleidoscope and they worshipped while the sun was sleeping and the stale chill to the air whispered tales too ancient and laced with danger to float through the atmosphere. she was selfish with rain and bathed herself in it, letting tributaries escape her skin when her lovers’ cries became too desperately crimson for her motionless silence, and so she would give her pale, wild smile and let her blanket of enchantment settle. she was an outcast whose curves were the most severe and it was easy to become trapped and lost in the yellowed mazes and canyons of her promises. a hot and disheveled dancing witch, she was, a mirage in a wasteland, sunburst rattlesnake and heat-fruit throbbing.