A cornucopia of brittlebush, white bursage, creosote bushes growing at the side of the highway in the fire of a sepia desert leading to the black and white of mountains, their snow contrasting with the shadow of stone. The highway opens to the viewer like a mouth, and I am swallowed by its pavement while the cars on my left drive toward me, carrying their sodas and backpacks and lavender lotion and all the grief we travel away from. Why go there? We ask. What lies behind us is not part of this composition.

When the dry antelope bones need releasing to flight, when your mother dies and it’s a long, empty journey of grief, when you stop the car, its gas gage sinking, and you pick sage to purify a new home, when sex appears before you with phallic mountains and wet valleys, when to burn will turn into ice and stone, when highways refuse to curve like your hips, when all you can do is long for the horns of the Bighorn sheep and the slink and slide of the gila monster, and the roadrunner and antelope are winded, and you are getting out your binoculars to see them, to make your pupils shrink enough from your own past to see what lies in the distance, devoid of light; that’s when you keep driving, not deserted but desert, the road like a tongue licking you, the distance not measurable, the sage crushed in your fingers, the future a distant past, where the dead skull of a creature you can’t identify looks at you with open eyes, and you take it with you as you travel toward what you must climb.

*Publisher’s Note:

Deserted Highway: Mojave Desert may be viewed in The Ekphrastic Review (14 February 2025), which featured poet and photographer Alexis Rhone Fancher’s photograph during a writing challenge for which she served as guest editor and artist. Results were published on 7 March 2025.

Kika Dorsey

is an author in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and her books include the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity (Gesture Press, 2023) and five poetry collections: Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010); Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), both from Word Tech Editions; Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection; and Good Ash (Pinyon Publishing, 2024).

Her poems and stories have been published in Freshwater, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com