I pass over “Woman Hollering Creek” headed East on I-10 
at 80 mph on a rainy Saturday and wake up Sunday 
morning with an image of a woman with matted black hair 
on the banks alone, wailing about what I do not know, 
but loud and long enough that half the town or more 

must have stopped to listen. Maybe her grief was too sharp 
for anyone to want to intrude, or maybe the better part
of that county was someways related to the woman’s husband 
and just couldn’t afford the complex burden of opposing him 
to give her sympathy, risk years of his crosswise looks, curses.

A lot of those Lone Star buckeroos are hard-cooked 
sons of bitches. So she stayed down below the flat, level land,
its cattle, its sagebrush, mesquite, in a deep cut where rains 
run off. Sand, caked mud. She screamed, wrenched.  
The town listened, and remembered. Talked about it for years,

even after she left, went back to where it was she came from. 
‘Til finally she came to own that creek with her sorrow. 
Still does own it by name in a land so dry, so hostile 
that many of the people there had given up on having feelings 
other than thirst or hunger a few generations beforehand.

Those roads had given themselves up
hours before. Lay ghosted out, hollow, 

except for the rip of our wake. 
Mailboxes, milkweed, barbed wire.

It didn’t matter whose car we had.
Who was driving. Desire was the fuel.

Highways were our veins. Cigarettes
and beer were commas between the 

hours and the aching and the movement.
Girls just as aching, broken dolls. Husks 

from which woman were emerging. We 
needed to let ourselves go within them 

or they needed us, our needing them. We 
did need them and little else but the aching, 

the emptiness, and the point of balance 
a star’s spear could reach as we gazed down 

from a rock above quarry waters, ready to 
dive head first, again and again, into darkness.