Bildungsroman

Lyd Havens

Arizona, March, sunscreen sprayed directly onto my chapped
lips. I read a fictional diary in the shade, noted the crescent
shaped marks on my palms. Or maybe I should call them scales,
like the back of a Gila Monster. Recurring image of my arm
split in its jaws, gnawing to release venom, kicking up dust
by myself. Desert mirages—they must seep into you young,

like fear in a cut of veal. Yes, I had experience with death young,
but not with dead bodies. Always closed casket, hands chapping
at the crematory. Both my grandparents died in July. Dust to dust,
my grandfather told my mother, removing his feeding tube in her presence,
asking to die at home. Which meant I had to come home. Surrendered the arm
rest on the flight to Phoenix. Held a broken pencil to the window for scale

as we descended. It is not an easy landscape to forget, backyard shale
underlining the very me of me. Psychic sunburn. I was young
the way a saguaro is young, a paring knife inching skyward, armless
for at least its first decade. I guess I scabbed over early. Sapped
and sleepwalking in my own first decade. Fingernails following the creases
in worn tissues. Out front, the white rose bush seeped out rust

colored petals. My first period arrived during sixth grade PE, dust
collected in my first pharmacy bottle, I watched carpenter ants scale
a mesquite tree instead of finishing my homework. In regards to the recent
implosion of my home life, my science teacher told me, You are too young
to be depressed. I’ll never forget it, the disdain in her face, her eyeliner chipped
& gathering in the corners. Before she sent me away, she put her arms

around me. Patted my head. I hid in the bathroom after, wrote on my own arm
I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THIS. I was right. I remembered while dusting
my grandparents’ living room in the first July. Outside it was 112, daylight chapped,
street signs melting into incoherence. In my head I asked if the scales
could be tipped back into my favor, whatever that meant. I am young,
I reasoned, allowed self-pity to oxidate again. Trained my eye to the crescent

moon still visible, a complete lack of clouds in the sky. I should know a crescent
moon is not sympathetic the way a full one is, but what is the harm
in wanting it to be? My family, shrinking. Phoenix, burning. My youth,
hated & now wasted. I was raised alongside uncertainty on a dirt road, dust
always stalking behind me. Were the dead rattlesnake’s jaws open? Were its scales
dried up like jerky, or already eroded? A friend’s father showed me how to chop

their heads with a machete if necessary. Six minutes, bodiless, the head’s chapped
hiss echoing off the calcium in the ground. Pupils thin as paper. The scales
where its throat used to be, teaspoons of blood. I vomited in the brush, inhaled dust.

Lyd Havens is the author of Chokecherry (Game Over Books, 2021) and a co-author of I Wish I Wasn't Royalty: A Playable Chapbook (Game Over Books, 2020). Her work has previously been published in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and Grist, among others. Born and raised in southern Arizona, Lyd is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia. 

Instagram: @lidheavens