For Jamaica, for Ru

The TX-17 highway: we stop to watch buzzards

supping a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a

Persian rug of emerald and brown, the sky clogged

with thunder. What will save you but this Texas morning,

the tea you accidentally spill across someone else’s novel.

A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines,

shake the static from dresses. We’re singing instead

of sleeping. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man

at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods

speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south.

You might say this is about exile, mountains eroded by

six hundred years of women’s feet, the lovely press

from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south,

mothers find their daughters’ bodies in boxes. The dusk

skittered Marfa lights, slashes of magenta and indigo

against the black land, as monstrously beautiful

as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names

the dying plants. She reads the green cacti like a palm.