Melanie Robinson | Issue 6, Spring 2025

pegging, a pastoral

You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long blacktrees. – William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All: Chapter XIII [Thus, weary of life]”

polite cactus wrens linger with eyes

that glint across dusty, placid twilight

old book said some consider the joshua

tree to be the ugliest plant in existence

baby yucca moths snuggle sweetly to its

acrid flowers & ossified leaves growing in

bullet time—i watched the crooked-mouthed

poet piss all over the coxcomb mountains

his dumb silhouette was marred by tawny 

clay & a marmalade sky freckled with vultures

he writes about old trucks & a polished 

walnut bowl he made for his young mistress

a carpenter, a tourist in snakeskin 

boots & a pearl snap—truth isn’t

surmountable, yet i rode him & called 

him daddy—forgive me, patsy

cline, it’s the mojave, the tequila

cured with rattlesnake meat or

the clouds o’keefe stretched into canna

lilies—you know i can’t say no

to a ceremony or a garden filled

with the sloughed skin of insects

lean into the artifice, salvageable keep-

sakes—beige macrame, prickly pear

syrup, ornate ashtray, pricey

prerolls, pushpin night, sheer

linen curtains, a desert cottontail

munching on bony shrubbery

in the distance—what a 

scene, what a performance