At the bathroom mirror of a rented casita somewhere in Flagstaff, I discover half the desert came home with me.
Red dust gathers along my collar, settles into the seams of my brown canvas backpack, which used to be cream-colored, and fills the tiny crease above my sock line where the trail outsmarted me.
When I untie my boots, sand pours onto ceramic tile in two soft cones.
The room suddenly feels like a painting, “Composition of Woman and Borrowed Earth.”
Juniper pollen clings to the cuffs of my sleeves.
There’s grit beneath my fingernails, iron-rich and stubborn, the color of old brick after rain.
OPI might name it Jazz Hands In the Desert.
I touch my scalp and feel dust there too, worked deep into my hair through wind, sweat, sunlight, and twelve miles of canyon trail.
Good.
Today earned its right to linger a little longer.
Some people spend all day trying not to stain themselves.
I understand the instinct.
There are white couches. Important emails. Polished shoes. Entire industries built around remaining untouched.
But somewhere between mile four and the moment I sat directly on a warm rock without checking for dust, my body remembered something older than neatness.
Children know it first.
Mud puddles. Finger paint. Grass stains.
At one point I crouched low to photograph a cluster of desert marigolds forcing themselves through fractured stone.
When I stood again, one palm carried sap, and a line of sweat ran slowly from my neck down the center of my spine.
Perfect.
By late afternoon, my shoulders glowed pink, my lips tasted faintly of salt and sunscreen, and every object inside my backpack had acquired the thin orange film of Arizona.
Even the map.
Especially the map.
I ate trail mix with dusty fingers and decided the extra crunch only improved it.
Somewhere near the ridge, a woman passing me said, “Beautiful day.”
Then both of us kept walking without needing to improve upon the sentence.
There's nothing important to say out there. Beauty speaks and we simply listen.
And feel. And I'm convinced—
The body experiences some landscapes on a cellular level.
Scientists eventually gave the phenomenon a long Latin name after discovering certain microorganisms in the soil can calm the nervous system.
Mycobacterium vaccae. But I think we should call it thereasonpeoplecry when kneeling in the dirt.
Meanwhile, every child who ever came home with muddy shoes was already conducting the experiment.
Back at the casita, the sink runs briefly orange-brown when I wash my hands.
Dust circles the drain.
I pull one sock inside out and enough sand falls free to start a small dune beside the bathmat.
I hope my Airbnb rating doesn't take a hit.
The shower waits.
Still, I linger a moment longer in the mirror, sun-tired, windblown, grinning slightly at the woman standing there with desert still gathered in every visible place.
Grand Canyon landscape reflecting recurring themes of resilience, transformation, spiritual geography, and memory in the poetry of Iris Lennox.
I recently created a new page called The Poetry and Themes of Iris Lennox, which explores some of the recurring imagery, spiritual landscapes, and questions that continue to shape the work.
The page traces themes of resilience, voice, desert geography, memory, theatre, and the sacred hidden inside ordinary life. It also gathers together several poems that have become central to the collection over time.
My little white cat stands at every doorway before she enters. Perhaps it is fear but I think it’s manners, and questions that steady her upon the threshold.
Is there anything here worth the risk it takes to leave the safety of the hallway, and what will I miss if I do?
No noise behind her, but I sit typing at my desk while she considers, a tiny pink nose weighing her options—
I say hello, which changes nothing, and now I weigh my kindness against her indifference as a thread moves across the floor, the air purifier beckoning it closer.
My little white cat enters not to see me but to inspect the thread and to maybe prove the room deserves her presence.
Patience by Iris Lennox
Moose Tracks are easier to eat in a bowl, but not nearly as engaging as racing to the drips spilling over the sides of my cone and knowing there are peanut butter cups gathering in the middle.
Why do the sweetest parts hide in the center?
No one eats M&Ms for the color, and you’d embarrass yourself if you dared say, “the peel is better than the orange.”
We all know some things ask to be opened— the banana from the stem, the shells at the baseball game, the foil around warm chocolate you forgot was in your pocket.
At least, for me, for today, for this moment,
all I need to do is taste sweetness with the patience of a toddler, unaware of the nature of stickiness,
and save the middle for later.
Father by Iris Lennox
He left before his first Father’s Day and mine.
But at least he left in style, with my mother’s car, all her cash, and glasses wrapped in a towel because they were worth keeping.
He worked in a bar and, from what I hear, he lived like he did.
At least that’s what strangers told me, each one carrying another adventure.
Someone up north. Another on the west coast. Then the east before he landed in Las Vegas.
The land of dreams won and lost all in the same night.
Sounds about right.
I met my father for the first time and the last one month before he died,
and every Father’s Day I try not to care.
Written in response to three words: curiosity, patience, father.
I spread the pages across my kitchen table, one hand on oak, the other on language.
Afternoon light finds the margins first, then the staples, then the black strokes of my name pressed hard enough to leave its mark three sheets down.
Good.
Some truths deserve depth.
The paper remembers dates.
It remembers names.
It remembers who stood where, who reached first, who kept speaking, who went silent, who needed silence to feel safe.
The ceiling fan turns.
Edges lift, but dare not fly away.
They stay. Pressure makes some run and others stay.
A throat is made of cartilage, muscle, membrane, two pale folds opening and closing over air.
Pressure meets tissue.
Even a whisper requires force.
I know this.
I have taught students to plant their feet, unlock their knees, drop their shoulders, open their ribs, and send a line to the back wall without asking the room for permission.
Never ask for permission.
I have watched a frightened girl find her stomach and then her voice.
I have watched boys speak one true sentence without laughing and become men.
I have watched language enter the body and change the way a person stands.
So when the hand came, when the pressure came, when silence came to wrap around, to shut me down, to choke me—
I know what a voice is.
The larynx bruises.
The breath adjusts.
Once, I lost it.
But don’t worry about me.
I just drink the tea, bite down on the Ricola, and breathe.
Shakespeare told us long ago,
“Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue,”
And I tripped.
A little.
Then I got back up.
And spoke until cartilage, muscle, membrane, air, ink, oak, paper, rooms, whispers, and men who mistake women for little girls
had to listen.
They reached for an instrument they didn't understand.
So I took what the body knew, what the stage taught, what the page required, what courage costs,
and I used all of it.
Outside, water climbs through xylem, one molecule pulling another.
Roots enter limestone by touch.
A seed splits in darkness
and takes root.
What does paper know of life?
Only what we tell it.
—Iris Lennox literary pen name of Jill Szoo Wilson
It’s a miracle when one act of communication takes place.
We take it for granted. “Hello,” and “Goodbye,” but what about the words we're not sure how to say and stubbornly try?
Every syll-a-ble we learn is from someone close by.
The voice of a friend or the first time you heard your grandma speak to your mom in a way that made sense, when she smiled so you figured you knew now what to do.
You got it. So did she. And what about him?
“This flower is red,” that much is true. But “This flower is soft,” could be misconstrued. “I was talking about color,” she shrugs as she sits. He insists, “A flower is petals and my first Valentine’s kiss.”
How many words for one simple thing? A moment remembered? An idea flying through?
And so you see, even flowers mislead. If they can (uh-oh) what chances do we have to receive or to give in the way
your experience taught and your family still chooses, and what of the friends that come and go, and the fights someone wins and another one loses?
Brick by brick the schema is built, and we climb to the top
and fall until
what I said is what you heard or close enough to be understood.
The things that slow us down can't be manufactured.
They have to come— arrive— without warning and before or after we're ready.
Today maybe it's a train rattling through your car and the wind it leaves behind picking up the ends of your hair and pulling you back into something some time when a train was in the distance— was it home, or something like it? When the whistle of the train—
Or a phone call where the C-word is uttered and everyone in the room collapses, but underneath. On the inside. The push and the pull of, "But wait. Just one second ago life was about this or that and now this." Or
a man catches your eye down the hall, a woman laughs with a crinkle in her nose— had it been there before? Maybe only today and then a series of wonderings when wandering is no place to stay, or
sitting on a rock in the desert not asking questions and questions begin to ask themselves in the form of prayers you couldn't hear during this morning's coffee.
When does a prayer begin and when does it end?
Where was I when I was the one who took the breath inward to address God on an exhale and why am I still breathing in one elongated breath since— when?— Was I seven? Or forty-three?
And who was I when I thought or felt or began "Dear Lord . . ."?
What is movement but our footsteps being heavier than air but lighter than we expected because the weight of now never lands until we look back.
Today I looked up into the trees in a place I know well and I saw the sunlight weave itself through every leaf and all the way down, just as it has before and there was a moment when all I could do was forget where I was forget what I was thinking and maybe I breathed but who is to say
I crouch where the sandstone breaks into shallow shelves the color of old bone, one knee in dust, the other on loose grain that slides downhill with every shift of my weight.
The rock is so warm I imagine an ancient woman setting a kettle here and boiling water for tea.
Emerging from the crevice—
yellow.
I admire the Painter through the painted and wonder at the Breath and the breath it takes to stay, in this place,
alive.
Four open cups lifting from a seam no wider than the edge of my thumb, petals folded back shamelessly in the morning light.
I lean so close I can smell the yellow. Or is that the bone? I've never smelled either so it's hard to say.
My hair falls forward and brushes the soil, one strand catching on a blade of green— I feel like an intruder,
slowly, hooking it behind my ear, then lower my face again— this time with more care— close enough to see grains of pollen caught in the folds, gold dust gathered at the center.
Treasure left out in the open.
A bee was here.
Maybe an hour ago. Maybe it's only been ten seconds.
How long do bees stay gone? Quickly,
I peer below the bloom. Silver leaves spiral outward in every direction, coated in tiny hairs that catch dust, light, and whatever the wind decides to leave behind.
I run one finger along the stem—
green at first, then red, then pale where the shadow begins and sunlight never quite made the turn.
I guess there are things even the sun never sees.
The stem narrows, twists once, then disappears into a seam too thin for my fingernail.
Still— there it goes.
Down through lime, through grit, through powdered shell, through pockets of black soil pressed deep between layers of stone older than language.
Roots no thicker than thread find water that probably does not splash.
I sit back on my heels, dust coating my jeans, my hand still warm from the rock, and watch one yellow cup
tilt upward another fraction toward the sun.
—Iris Lennox literary pen name of Jill Szoo Wilson
Iris Lennox 