SOUTHERN UTAH STRATA
By Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
Photography: Matt Morgan, VisitUtah.com
A storm over hoodoos darkened Bryce Canyon’s sharp blue sky —
we sheltered in a rock alcove beneath black clouds, our shirts
soaked with rain, your lips browsing the nape of my neck.
Then thunder flashed. We never knew how close lightning struck.
Years later we meet at Fort Deseret, take photos through mud door
frames from another century, adjusting apertures for light.
You returned east and I stayed in this country, accumulating a life
between volcanic peaks and Triassic hills in a land
charted by arches, pinnacles, epoch-old lava and basalt.
In the matte print, you lean against adobe walls — behind your smile,
the miles of desert beyond the Confusion Range touch
Utah-Nevada borders and reach me 30 years later putting dishes away.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is a creative writing professor at Southern Utah University. Her chapbook “Ruin and Light” won the 2014 Anabiosis Press chapbook competition, and her poems were featured in the art book “Invisible Shores,” published by the University of Utah’s Red Butte Press. She is a three-time winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition for poetry and the co-editor with Karin Anderson of Torrey House Press’ “Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild.”