Funny how I can’t remember
just how the Lupine looked
like a brand-new town,
the crowded Gilia, white heads
bowed without a photograph
for proof. All the pretty faces
gone, I have a crush on spring—
as my mother, her coffee cup
beside me, would often say
of my impetuousness—I fall hard,
all ill feelings squeezed
from the inside out, swept away.
But etched in my skin, in the walls
of my brain, I can’t forget the dust,
every particle I inhaled of drought.