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Arizona Is Built On Geometry
Horizontal lines where open faced sky
meets red soil, cacti, jagged rocks,
snakes of tar highway, where
the sun is a perfect circle, undulating
light over every pore and grain
and gristle of glistening sand.
Armed hosts of saguaros stand
in perfect formation, their shoulders
back, limbs pointing at the zenith.
Each leaf of prickly pear is a uniform
teardrop. Sidewinders and rattlers
slither, leaving “S”s across the dunes,
warming their blood on igneous
and sedimentary rubble.
The rectangles and squares of adobe houses
bake under blazing heat. The perpendicular
lines of crucifixes are etched with names
lost and ignored, their inert memories
blister and burn beneath a growing sphere
of hydrogen and helium,
its gravity tugging them
to cold and lonesome space.
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Annaliese Wagner is a student at Stephen F. Austin State University. She has appeared in her undergraduate journal HUMID as well as in The Blue Route, Far Enough East, and is forthcoming in The Blue Lyra Review.
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