SK Carter

Juniperus arizonica*

In the still hours of morning,
you window drift back to a junipured childhood,

barefooted, knee scraped and alive
with all the miracles of weeds.

Beneath boughs that embrace, you bake mud
between your toes, brew flaking bark with spittle

and too ripe fruit, lungs drinking in its peppered fragrance,
a heady ritual of becoming earth. Even then

you secreted away this longing in the hollow space
between weathered roots and ribs

like trinkets nestled in jam jars: a rabbit’s jaw,
an owl pellet, half a quail’s egg, an inclination

to strip back the bone of the thing. Even then
your body like the hills beyond defied adult taxonomies.

This a sleeping giant, that an appaloosa, dappled pine
and basalt. There a woman enchanting another

and here your chest a glimmering sand bank, stripped bare
in monsoon floods, shoulders dirt-freckled boulders

where snakes shed their skin, wiry fingers
always trained on horizoned wilderness and stained

berry-purple like that far off, beckoning ridge
and its knowing god of queer desires.

A Tree Remembers Themself a Nymph

before I became the crack
in a trunk, bark dry

as winter lips, when I
was a roving eye

and men like so many saplings
snapped under my gaze

I found my fingers knuckle-deep
in soft flesh

of blackberries
tongue stained and sticky

her seeds between my teeth
I had thought to save

for planting
in hedgerows of sloe

her thorns impressed
crowns on my flesh

she bent my head back
to the water

hair trailing like willow
in the stream and I trembled

but in the crevice of seasons
I began to quarry bitterness

mine webs of regret like rot
between bark and bone

a bat under moonlight must find
its way by feeling absence

and I must ghost with the leaves:
part desire, part decay

*Juniperus arizonica – or the Arizona Juniper – was previously categorised as a variety of Juniperus coahuilensis. With the help of nrDNA data sequencing this taxonomy was reconsidered, and in 2006 Robert P. Adams identified the junipers native to the southeast Sonora desert as unique.