Gender Desert

A baby is not floated down the river
but still calls the desert home,
still cries for her father when the night comees.
A child of sand who tears up when the thunder

 is too loud to hear anything else
but her father’s iguana scraping rapidly against its cage.

She is reminded that she is girl.
And in the desert garden of her heart
she must learn how to take care of a bonsai tree.
Her father’s favorite tree that he could never grow.

A desert biome gifted with the task of caring for something wanted so badly.
But never came true.

The bonsai tree needs correct placement
She realizes it will not fit, how
she would like it to.
She texted a picture of the bonsai to her father.

That bonsai is beautiful.
It’s probably more than 100 years old.

She likes kissing women. Her heart, a tar pit
where the coyotes pillage her innards,

 does not feel dusty or riddled with displacement.

 She forgets to water the bonsai
and it cooks

underneath the dog days
of her fleeting beforeness.

A fire flicked onto the dry bonsai. A fire flicked itself silly and now it is killing. It set ablaze the knotted limbs, stockpiled with years. Their screaming sounds calming and unnerving.
Pounds of pine undoing its binding from its host.

 Replace years with femininity. What happens when femininity coos to temperature and death.
Its heart beat cauterized. The bone relics squealing about being real and having.

Nothing can grow in the desert
that is not meant to be there.
Their heart a painted tortoise shell
concaved by understanding that the bonsai

was a gift from their father
who sees them so much differently now.

---

Marisa Vito is a queer Californian, Filipinx poet who has published with Crab Fat Magazine, The Spectacle, Mixed Mag, and the Los Angeles Magazine. She is the Digital Content Manager for Copper Canyon Press.