The Empty Sign by Dasha Bulatov The empty sign in the southwestern desert shifts upon its stage, wavers in the swell of the road. We scuttle through the blood slate of the sand, west to Arizona, to Sedona with its vortices and a meteor’s crater, galactic shards of tectonics scathing upwards, all wounded and hallucinatory. Alexander says we’re a long way out of Julian, its sunflowers and juniper horizons, but we don’t need the map of the sign, he says the sun is enough, and his instincts, my body in the car steaming red shedding salt from the ocean into the rough of the land is enough, and he covers me with the gritty blanket to mean I should sleep through the worst of it, the worst spin of vultures in the August desert and the heat of their friction. And once we hit the Sonora, where I feel my first hate and ache, it’s no stopping till Mexico, as if all of America were the desert we know from its parts. Alexander promises me a bed there where he will press into my neck, promises me a basket full of sand dollars and beige linens, rooted sunflowers in a terracotta pot only if we spend nothing till then, nothing at all, and then he tenses his forearms against the curve of the road. theMeadow 121
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