Poem

The locoweed that kills horses blooms first from a crack in one of your constructions.

Also known as astragalus it puts on purple, rambles its dense leafstalks, throws silhouettes.

The bobcat stalks near. You’ve watched him amble the low adobe wall, your glassed-in face new to his house—his hills; his piñon and cholla; his settled gravel; his substrata nailed with wells.

Wind repositions juniper cast-offs in sandy soil. It would take a lot of locoweed to kill a horse, you think; and native bees sip the purple bells. Despite the wells’ plummet, the cholla swells yellow fruits from its tips—its angle on living insisted on by rows and rows of sharp spines.

Radha Marcum’s collection Bloodline received the 2018 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. Her poems appear widely in journals throughout the U.S. She lives in Colorado where she writes the Poet to Poet newsletter (poettopoet.substack.com) and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.