Desert Trash, by Camille LeFevre

From the Faraway Nearby, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1937

Desert Trash
 
Georgia, draped in black, scans the desert 
in severe absorption of the sun, eyes 
beading beneath her Stetson crown to glimpse
near mounds, far peaks, the telltale 
gleam of bleached bone, antler shed
 
            or skull, pelvis, vertebrae 
            of Diné livestock shot to rot 
            for the colonization of landscape.  
 
She paints, on canvas, the desert’s leavings 
with the velvet intimacy of extraction 
smoothing harsh form, rigid aridity, into 
erotic undulations, sandstone blood-let 
to peach furring the rack-studded sky
 
            pioneering her iconography 
            of omission, her ownership 
            of Diné homeland. 
 
She called them, her treasures, boney trash,
objets d'art deployed in remaking desert 
landscapes free of the living, morphing 
over time into myth, commodity, 
cliché 
            as the Diné endured, endure 
            continuing, as always, home 
            and away, to pray.  
            
Camille LeFevre

​Camille LeFevre crafts poetry and creative nonfiction, and teaches writing workshops on art and place, from her home on the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her first poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, will be published in Fall 2026. Her work also appears in Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Unleash Literary, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. She’s thrilled to have her work, once again, in The Ekphrastic Review.