Two Poems by Shangri-La Hou

Song for Sandia Mountain

At eleven, thirsting to be discovered,
I slept with my face in the dirt.
I was alone, I had not yet learned the methods of making fire.
I only knew the wide heart of you channeled into me
a desire to listen which would never close.

There, the seedling I heard pulsing beneath your crust
offered its senses to me: spells for silent footsteps
and a love for the roundness of toads.
Here, this tree is a watershed, these stones
the parameters of holy, and the undisplaceable
fact of you bears the heart-red rain fruit in the desert
where things are always running out.

Any underbelly we call Spring now, any tender turn from cold.
This year, the Rio Grande dried into a hollow we fill
with opinions, small bird bones licked clean by dust.

I am calling for the snow again on the land
with the piñon I used to pray under.
Where I once whispered your name to my loneliness
and the grass sang and the coyote replied—where I remain

gone as the Cibola fawn nudging against her night-cloaked
mother: Wake up, wake up.

*

Your neuroscience teacher said our memories change every time we access them

so let me tell you the story, again,
of the camping trip in sixth grade to the place
I don’t remember well, except it was in New Mexico
and there were many trees. Except

my ears rang as I trailed behind my friend
with an enormous backpack, snow filling our boots,
night opening the mountain with stars. A crooked sign
pointed right toward an open field

where even shadows glowed and to know up from down
you’d have to throw something. And here is the part I give in
and meet every shooting light with love.

Instead: we are searching for dragon scales
and bullet-hole eyes, alien trilling nested
between cicadas and slow-breathing

wood—mouth pink and swollen as the shell
of my mother’s night-blooming cereus
hours before the pearl revealed, one night only
for us to be beautiful.

So maybe I went left at the sign. Maybe
there was no sign and my friend, who takes your face here,
told me I heard the nightjars even though there weren’t any.

Today, I thought of you a thousand times
or one held moment. The way buds
outgrow their beds of snow.
Your face, blooming as it turns.

*

Shangri-La Hou is an artist, birder, and freshman at the University of Pittsburgh. She represented the Midwest as one of five 2023 National Student Poets, appeared as a panelist for the National Poetry Series, and serves as an editor for the literary magazine Collision. Nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, her work can be found in Canary – A Journal of the Environmental Crisis.