Today’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) prompt is: Write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. With class tonight, my time is super limited so I am building off of a poem I wrote previously!

Arizona

Where wild meets west, the vast sky turns into a real-life painting of mountains burning purples, blues, yellows, reds, and oranges twice a day; a prosaic production. Stars sprinkle the same sky at night, until you crick your neck trying to count them all. On the hottest days, it smells like melting asphalt. But on others, it smells like dusty earth giving rise to life—Javelinas chortling while grazing prickly pear. Rattlesnakes coiling and hissing. Rabbits hopscotching across rocks speckled brown. Lizards darting between low-lying, crackly bushes. Cacti standing guard, arms outstretched, as if offering you a hug.

Here, in the valley, there is space to stretch out. There is fresh air to breathe and time to breathe it. The days are warm and long; the kind of days you want to cozy up to until you fall into a sweet slumber with:

Dreamcatchers hanging
above, snaring bad dreams to
dissolve in the sun.