LIT ANGELS #30: DESERTED
Edited by Francesca Lia Block
Copyeditor: Kerby Caudill
Table of Contents
Poems by Camille Meder
Reverb by Jennifer Backman
Poems by Tracy DeBrincat
The Closing of the Joshua Tree Café by Carl Peel
Poems by Camille Meder
unfinished desert poem (previously published in Lit Angels #16 Ephemera) let's start by remembering a California night. when the chill set in wet patches seeped up, staining the sand with past rains. I will not forget that moonlight, fractured like the way you looked at me, distant eyes like a tactile crush of lips on lips aching toward barren hills. a cold breeze on warm flesh: hot mist rose from silvered springs, it was midnight, a fall meteor shower the slippery rocks the seconds between the starfalls when I should have kissed you. where will I be if the world ends? in the juniper flats where branches and memories creak your name. but on juniper avenue sounds are caged and muted by the thin halls an arced curve of a naked back in blue sheets warm enough to detonate between white walls. a cold wind carries the scent of desert sterility. smell of dirt roads in December glazed by the insufferable unfulfillment of ice. wintry potential of the unrealized. I sent you to die. that night I could have held you close, instead I spilled no secrets, no clandestine hunger to make you stay. since then, I’ve been living in the miles between you and me like a phantom. in the shadow of the bulbous rocks, the moon is waiting on the earth to rumble. the sand little ova under naked toes. and one day when love is but a voice in the desert, a wind from the past, a catalogue of my regrets— and every body feels the same, different cities in the same dream— I will peel these words off and burn them where the highway falls into sky. where we were Quixote in the yucca surrounded by windmills. don't rivers always run south? birds always fly home? so why am I driving north through valleys and towns with names like Despair? they say infants curl their toes when you stroke the bottoms of their feet. it is a reflex, like forgetting how to love. nights get cold fast in the desert. one minute,, , then the next I am holding my arms around body I am turning home alone with the silence pressing me tight from behind like a lover behind me the hills are empty, haunting ahead there’s only the sad and broken trees that litter the Mojave like they’ve been beaten. rain shadow in the moonlight, where rocks gleam like skulls, things move at their own pace. lit paper: quick flash, fast fade, for you. for me, a slow burn; perpetua of smoke flames across desert sky, ruddy consummation. just last October, the stars were splayed across the world, straddling the Mojave horizon, arching against the night. the sand was firm like gripping thighs around muscled hips. I have lived eternities in moments. if I were Lorca, how would I put this? soneto gongorino in which the poet asks her lover to love her. sonnet in the style of Shakespeare in which the poet begs her lover to touch her. but love, I’ve learned, means staring intently at shadows, searching for the reasons you can’t feel the same. in a wasteland with flash floods, sands wear down hope and rocks rise like teeth and on every patinaed face I see yours. I drown in memory. I unwrite you from dreams. six months later, moonlight shone between the gaps in crumbing granitic domes and I was alone. I knew all things end, but I couldn’t let go. even mountains have their fissures, and I wanted to touch you in the soft spots, the cracks. lines on your chiseled face and darkness crossing your silvered temples, I worshipped the facets of your interminable hardness. sand is nothing but the Earth decomposing. by the time you came back I’d lost my voice mermaiden and silent. ill at ease, a fish girl in a vernal pond like some rare and ephemeral shellfish. unheard and unseen. do you think of me? I think not. because you came back with the uncertain slowness of late winter weather, pitter patters and drizzle, but I am July rain coursing down washes in a torrent. at dusk coyotes howl to their mates and owls declare their loneliness. these western lands are nothing like your sterile heart. and I feel time passing. if I left that would be why. I have seen rocks fall and animals die. dead hyacinth grows here and violent cacti, erupting from the crevices between holding on and letting go. sometimes on top of enormous boulders one sees the smoothest hollows where a single pebble rolled around, flushed by water and wind to carve out a void that will never be filled. in the moments after storms, choking on freedom with its flavor like the grave, refusing a world where all is dust, I have drunk drenched air laden with the taste of wet granite, I have screamed your name in so many ravines. because you of all people know that even at the end of the Earth, where cold rules all and the air is thin with impossibility, there are strange birds—creatures I have never seen— that mate for life, unlike you. how much better to be a simple thing, all feathers and love. love song for Peter Pan I watched you set sail from inside the enormous eye where sand eroded from a gnarled tree root. just like that, lost boy, I grew old trying to root in sandy soil, counting the seasons in your comings and goings. you left me drowning in California poppy, snatching at handfuls of red and orange. and when you flew away to Neverland, you’d be back, you said, and I drowned in California poppy. boy of twists and turns, you have been so silent— but what could you say if you came back? dare you presume to tell me about your wanderings? palpitations: hope is the death of everything. are you back in our desert when you dream? our spot where the rocks rose around us like a womb and rough concavities cradled the moon? do you imagine my face, with new lines like paths etched by your departures? but I will not be the woman who weaves and waits. I will set fire to all these flowers before I root in this place without you. once I ran away so far I found myself between smooth red walls like the walls of a heart and remembered: this is the place where you gave up where you turned it off but I can’t because I have known the highways (I have known them all) retraced like veins across the backs of hands I have loved whose palms I have met with mine and whose fingers I have interlaced tightly whose wrists I have pressed into mattresses and none of these no mountain I have climbed nothing in these vast lands where I fled you felt the same meant as much as the strong and fragile thing that torqued inside me when I kissed the gaunt luster of your temple but I will not sing for you when you are gone. I will love you until the engine falls out but, all good things must, you said, and I know how that sentence ends.
Camille Meder resides in the Southern California desert and is a PhD candidate in English at Claremont Graduate University, where she is currently writing a dissertation on Federico García Lorca. A native Texan, she has also lived in New York and Colorado and also holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MAT from Bard College. Camille is co-managing editor of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and has previously taught high school English. Her publications include “Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists,” co-authored with Wendy Martin (Wiley, 2022). Her fiction and poetry appear in publications including High Desert Journal, Lit Angels, and em-dash literary journal. Camille is also a rock climber with numerous first ascents and an equestrian who loves spending time with her very beloved horse, Sailor.
REVERB
By Jen Backman
“Gary. Are you seriously telling me you want to spend two nights partying in the desert with your work friends? Who are twenty years younger than you? And single?”
Gary just stood there not saying anything. But Cathy hadn’t really expected him to.
“Because that’s weird, Gar. It’s weird and you know it.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“And, frankly, it’s bullshit to turn this into my issue. Like, now you can say to your kid friends ‘oh I really want to go to the concert, but Cath feels weird about it’ and roll your eyes and then it’s like I’m the paranoid, unfun, you know, pee-on-your-parade wife or whatever.” She put the frying pan she was drying down on the dish rack but not before wagging it at him like a large, scolding finger for emphasis. “Bullshit.” She waited to hear which direction he was planning on taking this thing.
“Two of them are single, not all of them.”
“Ah, so you plan to derail my point with minutiae.”
They looked at each other for a minute, a few paces apart. Gary knew he could say any number of things to diffuse the relatively thin tension in the air—could reassure her in any number of ways. But he didn’t feel like it. Let her stew around in it a bit, he thought. He’d wonder later why he chose, in that moment, to be a bit of a prick instead of doing what he knew was the more true thing, the thing that showed Cathy how much he valued their marriage. He would end up accusing himself of many things in the months that followed, all much harsher than the truth, which was that he felt he could afford to be a prick in that moment. He felt their marriage was safe, wasn’t going anywhere, nothing could touch it. He could have a little huff, do the little act—he is a free person in the world! He is fun and wild and young-at-heart, and it is only her need, her dreary domesticity that reins him in, keeps him contained. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable, etc.
“Cathy. It’s for the Bon Fowler show, not some random party in the desert. She hasn’t performed in years.”
“Well, my point still stands, Gary.”
He shook his head and backed out of the kitchen in exaggerated fashion, arms outstretched, palms facing her. And then, if that wasn’t enough to get Cath good and fucking steamed up, he couldn’t help himself. He just had to final-word it. Halfway down the hall, back turned, lurching into his office, he launched over his shoulder: “You didn’t really make a point, Cath. You’re hedging again. Dr. Henderson will say that herself when you tell her alllll about it on Thursday.”
She didn’t have to be looking at him to know that his eyes were lolling up toward the heavens when he said it. Cath saw plenty clearly from where she was, standing still in the kitchen, a stack of dishes on the countertop next to her. In the moment before Gary’s study door shut behind him and she turned back toward the sink, Cath thought about the piercing quality of an eyeroll, how even a completely unseen one seemed to lodge itself somewhere between the shoulder blades. Or at least it did with her. She filed this slight away with the others and picked up the Corningware. No point in stewing. He was just trying to get at her anyway. Probably feeling his age, thinking about driving three hours out to the desert in the summer heat and then splitting a house with a pile of coworkers. Like a department meeting you had to pay for. With that pathetic little show of disagreement he had just put on, she began to doubt that he even wanted to go at all.
And he was right, she would tell Sharon alllll about it on Thursday. Cath could already feel the pull of it, the urge to filter back through the exchange, the process of ordering it, then the weighting and shading, thinking about which words she’d use. Like a translator, almost, she thought, and then chuckled to herself. When I tell Sharon about it, do I go for accuracy, or do I aim to capture the feeling of the disagreement?
At some point, it all got jumbled anyway, especially with Gary, who had innumerable verbal wrenches to throw and chaos to introduce when he didn’t want to participate in a conversation. That’s the kind of sparring you got when you married an academic. And a wordsmith academic at that. Sometimes she wondered if it was malicious, all his contrariness, his almost steadfast refusal to make things plain and unambiguous. But then she’d see the glimmer in his eye and know she was in on the joke. Cathy knew him, after all; had known him. Sometimes Gary got bored and wanted a life more like a movie. So, he would stir the pot.
But Gary didn’t come with her to therapy anymore anyway, so it was always already going to be her version of events that Dr. Sharon walked through. What did it matter if he might characterize things a bit differently?
Cath ran the soapy dinner plates under the faucet one by one. Before she removed each dish from the water to dry, she slid her fingers across its surface until she felt an absolute smoothness, a perfect absence. Then she dried her hands on a nearby tea towel, applied lemon-scented lotion from an economy-sized plastic bottle on the countertop, and went to bed.
In his study, Gary didn’t feel angry or worried or have even a passing thought about emotional pain, caused or received. Certainly not in regard to an eyeroll. It would never occur to him that another person’s offhand gesture might enter one’s own body, much less take up residence there. Neither was he reflecting on the disagreement, crafting a scene to relay and rehash. He wasn’t thinking about Cathy at all. By the time Gary shut the office door and kicked off his slippers, he was pouring himself a glass of wine and wondering which songs Bon would choose for the set list.
Because, the thing was, Gary had said yes six months ago when his work friend, Chiff, had asked if she should buy an extra ticket to the show in Joshua Tree. He had only said “maybe” when it came to staying overnight with the rest of their little crew. Not that he’d mentioned any of it to Cath then, of course, assigning that task to Future Gary, who, now that Future had arrived, was content at having at least broached the subject. At present, all versions of Gary were focused solely on remembering which app was streaming Jim Jarmusch’s Bon Fowler documentary. He put his glasses down on the side table and rubbed the bridge of his nose, tracked the doc down on Criterion, took a sip of wine and placed that glass on the side table, too. Leaning back into the worn leather of his favorite chair, Gary let himself relax into the particularly lovely state that was part listening, part blurred out watching, and part sliding in and out of sleep while Bon’s life spooled out before his (only occasionally) resting eyes.