The woman in the picture is afraid and compelled. I am following a body a water to its source. Memories echo back better in black canyons. I am 41 in this picture, recently divorced, a single mother to a tenacious seven year old daughter. I work in a Resort Spa on the Strip. I am a pair of lavender hands and the word, certainly. I imagine my hometown Las Vegas isn’t much different than any other complicated woman with her beauty fondled and mystery misunderstood by thirsty travelers hankering for escape. I am a sudden swooner for Vegas construction cranes and their resemblance to showgirl legs. I write little weird flashes, memoir and poetry. The woman in the picture is following a ghost in the shape of a bighorn sheep, she is naming the bones and writing her way out through story. The desert will house your grief, if you let it, but you’ll have to dig it back up, word by word. I am afraid to tell my stories, which is reason enough to tell them.

I grew up on the outskirts of Las Vegas, far from the iconic Strip, where flash floods were more likely than jackpots. My father came out west on a coin toss and went on to become to the director of the World Series of Poker. We play Texas Hold ‘Em on Thanksgiving. My writing is often influenced by place and the pop culture of the Reagan era. I am curious about the effects of of disasters, such as the Challenger explosion and the subsequent chemical disaster at the PEPCON plant, a few miles from my childhood home. I miss riding my BMX through the Mojave desert as a child and tend to find beauty in the honesty of children, shelter dogs, ordinary struggles, curbside discarded items and street-sweepers at sunrise. I feel fierce nostalgia for the complexities of the neighborhood I grew up in and I hope that by remembering and writing about the kinds of places where people and objects are broken, readers might touch their own trauma with a little less loneliness.