Joshua Tree

There are thousands of burning bushes here in Joshua Tree, in the desert - but God lost his voice to the parched air.

Meteorites freckle the ground, dry like a desolate psoriasis on the face of California. The air cracks my sinuses until they bleed. Sand blows for miles in every direction. Mountains crumble to pieces in the distance. Spectral sunsets burst with blood and fire. There is so much dust that I don't even bother. Small, gutted houses, dwarfed and destroyed are left to erode every few miles. Like those abandoned homes, it is difficult not to be sanded down to almost nothing.

How does anything live here? I may as well be a whale (come, Ishmael, and die. My namesake; the slaughterer can kill one more). My saturation is ostentatious - I am drinking bottled water. The sun draws the brown melanin of my gypsy-Jew ancestry up through my tissues and roasts me bronze.

The Joshua Tree – the yucca, with sword-blade leaves and a knack for staying alive reaches up and out - bent at the joints - defying the heat.

How did he wind up among the cowboys? Joshua - the warlord, stuck for forty years in the desert slaughters the Canaanites. He is punished - he is glorious, with a tree-body suffering for each of the God-granted dead.

I’ve yet to strap dough to my back and leave the Holiday Inn.