Sonora

— after Hannah Lillith Assadi’s book, Sonora
 
I read Hannah’s book to learn how coyotes can be baited
off path with a piece of bloodied meat in a ziplock bag.
Hannah writes about why aliens always land in the desert
(because it looks so hygienic) and why teenagers keep ending up dead
next to cacti erected like crucifixes in the night. Some parents
caress a child’s imagination to see nightmares. I saw just one ghost
when I was little, rocking in a chair next to my bed, a pioneer lady
with a bonnet. She told me to meet her on the tire swing
in the daylight but never had the nerve to show.
As a kid, I had a blonde imaginary friend named Jenny who
wore a red collared white dress. I gave her my bed one night
because she was my guest and I didn’t want to be rude.
I was hallucinating white women everywhere— so deferential
to their graceful, immaterial bodies, their cooing requests, the demure
fashion that hid a lust for conquest. I slept on the ground of my closet
like a servant. When I was found, it was sweet distress. My parents held hands,
relieved that no man had come for the youngest child of the only dark
bodied family in a radius for miles and miles of this Albertan suburb.
What would I have done if I were them? Who would I have accused?
I went missing a few times as a child and I always wanted a trophy
when I was found, as if there was credit to be given for being discernible.
Hannah writes about how curses spread best between the narrow chop
of mountains and valleys. She writes that suicides can multiply due to weather,
how the inside of wind is a voice telling you where the pistol is kept,
how lightening becomes like ibuprofen. In Arizona, all the Starbucks
feel haunted and people get haircuts as a way to time travel. It’s the kind
of book that follows you around afterwards, where you try to shake it off by
drinking too much coffee and then masturbating or walking barefoot
on a small stony overgrowth of a stranger’s driveway in Montauk, NY,
hoping the imprint massaging your underfoot will knead the spells out
of your ever thickening blood, knotting itself into a gentle exorcism.