I. The rain doesn’t smell the same here, and neither do I. Warm, resinous, alive: piñons and junipers, greasewood and ponderosa, the ghost bloom of Apache plume snagged on old barbed wire, claret cup cactus blooming scarlet against broken stone—plants whose names I had to borrow from strangers. These smells have no words in my body; they arrive like teeth or tides or prayers from other shores. Sun encapsulated in tree limbs like fruit. A whip crackle of thunder behind...
