and there on the horizon, it stood:

my own initiation
small giant of a mesa,
red as rust, ridged caldera
ovulating small stones
down an eroding face,
to create a ground lush
with earth. the want

of tomboy rationality
was a wind before it:
cool & arid as my father,
pulling what was moist
from my body, the blasphemous
softness of water. already

i’d learned to cry within
the parameters of my skin,
organs pickled in a brine
of shame. yet i came to love
the shrinking taste, the tender
palimpsest of volcano
dormant, in cycles, the land
it created. it ran away from me–

not the fire, not the water,
not the wind, but the most
childish and powerless
part of my living.

there to the horizon,
it fled.
 

—Lisbeth White

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