Before seeing the roadrunner pluck
a baby Gambel’s quail from my front porch
and smash it on the ground for lunch
I loved him, the afternoon preening
from fence to fence and across the naked
ground of front yards, naked to not attract
javelinas, whom I’d also loved until the night
I came home and found a squadron of them
eating every plant I owned, including an entire
loquat tree, toe to tip. The ornate tree lizards, too,
making a mockery of gravity and pumping
their thousands of push-ups in the sun. How
I adored them, like a metaphor for pleasure,
until my sweet old cat, whom I love most
began carrying lizards in her teeth,
leaving beheaded lizards at my feet as if to tithe.
She barely blinked as I pried them from her mouth,
set them in the farthest reaches of the yard.
Numbly, they’d toddle back to her. Who am I
to grow cold at the sight of hunger? To privilege
my sacrifice over that of another’s? To think
it did not exist until I saw it with my own eyes,
as if love itself were not just like it?
July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Along with Mathew Weitman and Felipe Acevedo Riquelme, they are a co-editor and translator for the Unsung Masters series collection Rolando Cárdenas: The Life and Work of a Chilean Master. Their poetry and translations have appeared in Poetry International, McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. July is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic and lives in Tucson, where they are adapting their novel to film. www.julywesthale.co
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