Now I bring you to the world
of the unfillable, a constant dying
out of one cloud in the sky, three drops on the soil
and stars that drop down like rain
in the place where everything dries out eventually,
even the camel’s eye.

It was the land of the dirty forever,
this valley of no scripture,
a refusal to write, a declaration
to sing out in the land of manna,
in the flatlands of air, wandering
a path as clear as a mirage.
It was not Cain’s land.
It was not lead hills,
was not radio communication towers
or detonations the size of Hiroshima
five times over, and Taxol was just a tree.

Now I bring you to the world
of insatiable desert skin—
an unquenchable, sunbaked
depression of an ancient ocean
pit, the immaculate
death valley
where the new moon

slips off the sky—
looking like heaven
come down for a night
all carbon-bound in ground-up bones,
steeped in floodwater time and again
and dried by angels wavering the air
to bring you to the world.

Hallie Hayes is a poet and mother rallying the voice of the unsung, the ruined, the ravaged, the voided. The Mississippi riverbank boasts her home.