cemento y adobe
it’s easier to wait
amid sage and blue grama
where you can watch a round red ball of gas
slipping below the horizon
you said the desert was dead
i took you to The Three Sisters
animalitos darting among grasses
and lichen growing scorched-orange
magma once blazed through the earth’s crust
but cooled into lava
i screamed te amo and we heard it
echo in a canyon
we returned to the city that sleeps but never dries
we could reach out our bedroom window
and touch vines on the neighboring edifice
regresaré you said and left our small wooden rooms
years of RedLine elbowing
Mefirst v. Metoo parades
years inside this stale compartment
watching suns slide down panes of glass
the tallest building in town sways
three feet in either direction
people inside need to see water or wine
rippling in cups to believe
wind erases traces of sand angels
it can efface the face of a sphynx
me cansé de esperarte
of buildings blocking god
amid sage and blue grama
where you can watch a round red ball of gas
slipping below the horizon
you said the desert was dead
i took you to The Three Sisters
animalitos darting among grasses
and lichen growing scorched-orange
magma once blazed through the earth’s crust
but cooled into lava
i screamed te amo and we heard it
echo in a canyon
we returned to the city that sleeps but never dries
we could reach out our bedroom window
and touch vines on the neighboring edifice
regresaré you said and left our small wooden rooms
years of RedLine elbowing
Mefirst v. Metoo parades
years inside this stale compartment
watching suns slide down panes of glass
the tallest building in town sways
three feet in either direction
people inside need to see water or wine
rippling in cups to believe
wind erases traces of sand angels
it can efface the face of a sphynx
me cansé de esperarte
of buildings blocking god
September 2025
Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey and Nepal. She is the author of death is a mariachi, winner of the May Sarton NH Prize for Poetry (Bauhan Press), the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), dream life of night owls, winner of the Open Country Chapbook Contest (Open Country Press), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press). Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English at Wright College Chicago, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program. She is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts.
Art: Ellen June Wright, Diptych #1306, #1509, watercolor on paper