"The Peregrine Wind" by Nam Das
on visiting Joshua Tree while two simultaneous brush fires burn in Thermal, CA by Rachael Inciarte
there are things in the world which only
grow by luck, by rare rainfall, by
pollen tacked to the wings of white moths
in the high desert I imagined that
anything surviving must be hearty but
not all of us are made as oaks
some of us are born Joshua Trees, a
tangle of time spent bending to the
will of wind, proving up and ever reaching
consider though -- two hundred years to
grow and only twenty minutes to burn
down, no matter what kind of seed made you
grow by luck, by rare rainfall, by
pollen tacked to the wings of white moths
in the high desert I imagined that
anything surviving must be hearty but
not all of us are made as oaks
some of us are born Joshua Trees, a
tangle of time spent bending to the
will of wind, proving up and ever reaching
consider though -- two hundred years to
grow and only twenty minutes to burn
down, no matter what kind of seed made you
Rachael Inciarte works in a library in Southern California. She holds an MFA from Emerson College. Her writing has appeared in Post Road Magazine, NANO Fiction, Mutha Magazine, and Manzano Mountain Review. She plans to one day drink her coffee before it goes cold.
Nam Das (Filipino, b. 1989) creates open-ended visual stories by arranging figurative elements into an assemblage forming a central idea, an idea that plays around Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious or mythologems observed throughout history. He uses a limited palette of four colors in his oil paintings. Also called the Zorn palette, it's composed of: Titanium White, Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre and Ivory Black. Nam began working as a full-time painter in 2019.
