In the belly of mirage, a light shadow in waves of heat, she flickers, and we put our hands over our eyes to see her against the sun. Always her body in landscape, her limbs outlined in movement. We stand in the scalding desert with the heat wicking our greater souls to the surface, and she only comes to the greatest fluidity, drawn to the lowest point of stability. We stand and a sudden burst bolted over the ground, a low-bodied waddle on wings. She carves a line like electrical discharge, but it is dusty white against an even dustier white. She comes riding the back of a scorching momentum and when she touches us, she brings a skin that shines like sandpaper but rubs smoother than a beached bit of glass.

Her tongue itself is a living serpent, a bulbous shapeshifter. It flings out and gathers, a collecting articulation, and we are comforted in the pink morass of her mouth, a darkening cave with echoes.

When she was nine, a man put twenty pervious rocks in her backpack and she carried them down a mountain unaware.

We are all contained by the violences done around and to us, but it takes years to see this clearly. At first, we feel freedom and the innocence of a nightdoor closed with a light glowing orange by the door. We climb out of our beds and moonwalk to the bathroom, ignore the stars out the window except for their hypnotic beat against our wide pupils. The sound of crickets and frogs in the summer, the sound of muffled cavity in the winter. Our kitchens and bedrooms are sensations only, tempered by the colors they emit. The outdoors is wide and sharp. The pleasure of hacking through nettles to find the protected center of world with its brown needling web and the blue cracks through the pined dome. Later, somehow the stings become their own focus, no longer something to cry over and forget. We don’t know how this begins; but one day, the whole universe is patient, and the next day, knowledge has made us a spectrum. There is containment and there is what we contain, but in our circulating eternal, how many differences really lie in a syntactical twist?

When she was nine, she was made to carry fragments of a cooled molten on her back and when she found herself at the base, she lifted them out and found the damaged obsidians too dense and twisted to put down. So she packed them back up and made them her medicine.

How many can wait for the shapeshifter to arrive out of nowhere? How many have set their eyes to see the confusion of a changing ion? Out on a flat surface, you can stare at the horizon for ages and not see a damned vision but blindness.

She is a desert creature and finds herself in helter-skelter runs, and then loses herself once the sand settles. For us—those who wait not staring to the distance but falling deeply into the small divots of sand and cave and desert bush flowerings—she arrives with unexpected clarity, a fragment of broken rock breaking away. She brings her head sideways, looks directly to the eye and gathers sustenance on the glue of her language. Then she disappears into the next stone. And we are always content.