To My Hips, Both Removed

Near the Air Force base in Tucson, the boneyard

stretches for miles, mothballed warplanes

parked wing tip to wing tip in the desert.

Abandoned and ransacked, cannibalized

for fishhooks and Chevy fenders. Of course

boneyard makes me think of you two, incinerated

The saguaros hum with patience, waiting fifty years

to grow arms. The night-blooming cereus bides

her time to bloom just once before dying.

The desert is a harsh home. The devil’s claw

knows it, creeping forward on thorny elbows,

survivor gasping for water. We prop the hood up

on our rental car at night so pack rats don’t settle in.

And once, it would have been enough

resting and riding out the hard season. But

you have surprised me, the way truth can. You

let me down—collapsed like the biohazard

waste you’ve become—and the truth?

I miss you. Like the flyboy misses his B-52.

The cereus doesn’t in fact die, she breaks just once

Hummingbirds rappel down the palo verde trees

above loose-jointed cholla. And still the cactus wren

thrives inside thorns, and although the fire-tipped ocotillo

lifts its barbed arms to the sky, it does not surrender.