“How do you tell someone oh, it’s not that your mom threatened to stab me, did you know the state is going up in flames?”

“In one moment, we’d gone from a maze of Zoom grids fiddling with mute buttons and spotty Wi-Fi, to feeling the same Santa Fe breeze together…”

“They saw your curlicue tail, ever-wispy and bouncing with each trot, and laughed. Your chihuahuas will never make it with those dogs runnin’ round…”

“In the crushing quiet of a campus under quarantine, I’d been starving for sound all along…”

Because I’d been so busy recounting all that went wrong, I didn’t realize we were in their midst until we were submerged at their core, waiting for them to be seen…

“She and I were bookends, shelving one another’s histories into place so the other wouldn’t fall…”

“For each question about a new Navajo word, your mother would chortle and wave you off. Wannabe she’d hiss, exasperated, her hands hiding a grin…”

“Grief met me there, at the footbridge of the hotel where she’d brought her corn maidens towering to life under her fingertips, where they stood even now, waiting in the moonglow with open arms…”

Together we listened to your gloved fists cutting the air in quick swishes, each hit thudding into me…

I waved and, for an instant, something like sadness flashed in your eyes. Your grin faltered and you stared back into the blinding sunlight, revving your engine…