ANDREA LEWIS
White Sands 1 A lone coyote crests the mesa, lopes the line against the moonlit sky. She’s all inside her skin, inside her gray-gold fur, alpha female, shoulders working, jaw slack. She catches scent of Bernadette and waits. 2 The fifth-grade filmstrip showed the head of a longhorn steer inside the outline of a girl. A cartoon uterus and tubes. The monthly burden, colorless, flowed out politely, like the white sand in an egg timer. Cramps––the dragon teeth gnawing at her pelvis––would lessen if you touched your toes. If I touch my toes, I’ll barf. Bernadette waits for Theo on the hood of her stepdad’s Bel Air. She wants to climb up to the early morning moon. It droops behind the fire-eaten sign for Okie Joe’s. She wants to enter that coyote and outrun the pain, anyplace but here, this town, their house, her mom, who can’t stop buying crystal barware, accent pillows, accent tables, swizzle sticks, sunburst clocks, and bottles of booze so big they come with sculpted handholds in the glass. 3 You’re such a virgin, Rosa always says. She flaunts it every chance she gets, the sex she had with Rory right here in Okie Joe’s. They did it there on the glass-strewn floor, with peanut shells and mouse shit for a mattress, Sputnik blinking through the blown-off roof. The place exploded years ago, torched by passing galactic aliens, the locals like to say, because it’s up against the Missile Range and Trinity. 36 | Raleigh Review
