(PROSE POEM)

ARIZONA DROUGHT

​AMY KARON

Dusk of scorched August kills lights and batteries. Bereft, we feel our way downstairs to sleepwalk rippled asphalt. Night blooms around us. Awake now, we trace faded memories of desert petrichor, the sweet, pungent exhale of creosote after rain. Lights stay out, and eastern hills birth a dense moon. Our neighbors emerge, phoneless and befuddled, to murmur low and circle the lone field where nighthawks croak and boom and poorwills snatch moths from ghosts of ironwood. Moonset sends these tenants of earth and sky to sleep. But we stay out, the join of our fingers a compass marking the path toward thunderheads that burst on the horizon (at last, at last, at last).
 
Amy Karon's poetry and creative prose have appeared in Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Cricket, Inking the Unthinkable: Poems About Poetry, Mystic Blue Review, and Eternal Haunted Summer. She lived for years in the American Southwest and now divides her time between India and the San Francisco Bay Area.