Spotlight: New Mexico

In my next life I will come back as a Wild Mountain Woman
I will have more hair, the thick dark kind some women inherit
from lions I will have the hips to dance in layers of long
skirts

I will relocate to this sleepy town, and open a bakery I’ll get up
at dawn every day and grind my toes into the warming earth I’ll
know how to wrestle a rattlesnake, but I won’t need to very often

I will cook fragrant things like squash and herbed cheeses
and on Mondays we will have chiles relleños until they sell out
In the afternoon I will walk the stuccoed paths home

I will have a past dark enough that I left everything to come here
but light enough that children and cats trust me with their secrets

At night, I will collect the wind in my hair and watch the sun
as it sets over the Rio Grande I will go to sleep and dream
about tarantulas

Naomi Krupitsky Wernham’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in several literary journals and magazines, in print and online. ‘New Mexico’ is an excerpt from a longer collection of travel writing. To read more about the trip that inspired it, visit twowheeldrive.net. Naomi currently lives in Providence, where she is at work on a new collection of poetry and an old collection of stories.