WESS MONGO JOLLEY

Lost Love

Death Valley is a good place to stop the car and cry.
Desert sand is thirsty for your tears, and the August
furnace can boil the liquid despair from your bones.
 
Lying atop a rock, not far from your subcompact rental,
it’s easy to forget it all in the buzzard’s lazy circling—
easy to melt like a Dali clock, sizzling wax upon the
 
rock. You imagine what it would be like to stay here
forever, watching your car get liberated by the eons—
as tires burst, paint flakes, and rust burns away steel.
 
This wheel of fortune revolves and
revolves, like the black buzzards
in the brilliant, smoldering sky.

You listen as the distant
mountains get carried
off to the sea.