Border Crossing by Catherine Davis

Last we spoke, we dashed our cells onto highways, into the paths of semis. This wasn’t going to be like that. Fanning the pages of the album backwards, thumbing our noses at what hadn’t played out, so long ago. Here is Del Rio. There is Ciudad. In de Chirico stillness at the edge of town, edge of the country – alone I wait, I worry, I want. From this poor motel room it’s high-pricked sensation: a deep lazy backbeat underneath the jangling thrill, the winding, rise-and-fall chirring of the cicadas, and the maraca sizzle of a thousand rattlers’s warnings. An awning flaps, if only in my mind. The heat warps my view, revealing the true meltedness of it all. As it was then, so it is now: without warning, he appears on the rise at the end of the road. I watch the sexy strut of dissolution coming onward. My sultry almost-cowboy hitches and rolls his lizard rhythm down the road, pacing this eternal inevitable path. The jingle-jangle of desire pulses against the lassitude of the dust. His shadow is long. “I’m here,” he says. “You are,” I say. “You’re here,” he says. “I am,” I say. From the doorway, he watches with orange-flecked eyes. “Slouch toward me, rough beast. Ignite my womb.” “You don’t…” “Now, the full catastrophe. Come on, before we cross.” The dust on his face is fine. Of salt, of chalk, with a mineral bite. Lips like they ever were, like no others. We’re going down, down.

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