Prayer of the Palo Verde Beetle

I watch a Palo Verde beetle on its back, flail tibia spurs & tarsi & antennanext to the gas station pump. Heat of crude oil, of carbon atoms inabsorption; heat of desert in August suffocates my thighs & sweat runscourse of my legs in frozen witness. I am spiracles pin pricking a bodytrying to breathe. I am elytra to cement. I carry migration in my scutum:a song unraveling over generation after generation & yet a border weighson mind & mandible, a bullseye on my back, on the backs of those of uswho sing across imaginary lines with inherited wings. Goose flesh existsbefore ticker tape, before the shooter, before brown bodies agape &words consume & images consume & we look to the sky for semblanceof song & a wall becomes a scalpel in rip across abdomen of continentwhich first born an entrance, a womb. I am compound eye meetingbrown irises in firmament. I am cloud-cover prayer. Foot in reach to turnover & I collapse in a nation’s hesitation. I am pupils in drill, aghast.