TAMMY GREENWOOD | MYSTICS AND MISFITS

MYSTICS AND MISFITS

How can you love the desert?

they ask, coming down from redwood

mountains, the green of tender-shaded

skin, low-lying branches reaching

down like mother’s arms.

It’s hard to decide between protection

and redemption, to see beyond safety,

know the feeling of being set free.

You don’t choose the desert,

it pulls you like the moon.

Boulders of spooning bodies

blanketed by painted skies—

origami sky of colored paper cranes,

compass of Joshua crowns.

Landscapes offering only forgiveness.

Baptisms of sandstorms, promises of salvation,

where remembering withers

then blossoms from dried ocean floors.

Its daytime vastness equal to star-filled nights,

where heaven and earth converge,

where the end looks like the beginning,

the beginning, the end.

The humidity of a southern summer,

monsoonal clouds mushroom with rain.

Midnights full of mystics and misfits,

where blooms are reborn of stony desolation.

A place of resurrections, only survivors live here.

Their sorrows collected like seashells—

vessels of echoes calling the rest of us home.

Poet and printmaker Tammy Greenwood is a Louisiana native residing in California. Since graduating from California State University, San Bernardino, she continues her studies while working on her upcoming book of poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Rattle, Door is a Jar, ONE ART, Hyacinth Review, Rust & Moth, Orange Blossom Review, San Pedro River Review, Poetry South, Emerge Literary Journal, FERAL, and elsewhere.