Cabazon, California sits on the summit of the San Gorgonio Pass, that separates California’s Inland Valley from the Mojave Desert. Cabazon is known for its life-sized cement dinosaurs adjacent to a creationist museum, its sea of gigantic wind turbines that could daunt Don Quixote, and its huge golden casino. From the top of the 27-story resort you can see the I-10 Interstate Highway running between Los Angeles and Beaumont to the west, past the Palm Springs turnoff, and then east past Indio toward the Salton Sea.

bright lights
freeways, food stands
darkness beyond

Your friend Cynthia lives in a plush convalescent home for seniors a little ways from Palm Springs. She carefully manages an everlasting suspension, rarely leaving her bed. A death-hold on circumstance squeezes out possibilities of laughter, loving, being. Insulated and suspended, living a careful calculus of palliative self care, a bardo of no pain. No loss, no uncertainty, complete quiescent strategic suicide avoiding the high costs of chance. A few foods she allows herself to desire, especially butterscotch pudding. She loves the smell of clean sheets. Mostly she treasures lost memories, a time lived before, and then lost.

gray something
lunch platter by the window
not butterscotch

Today a nurse’s aide is making the bed, working around Cynthia’s inert lived limbo. The aide prattles while tugging sheets and tucking in corners. She goes on about Tony, her boyfriend, the one she loves, for whom she longs, and how he’s asked her to run with him, somewhere far away. Cynthia watches a lone Palo Verde tree outside her window struggle in this low-desert Palm Springs heat, barely holding on with meager water from a nearby rusted tap. It hasn’t grown a bit, in the years she has been here. “Maybe you should consider it,” Cynthia finally speaks. It stops the startled aide.

deep rooted
desert wildflowers bloom
hummingbirds

Salvador Dalí paints St. Anthony in the desert, naked and sunburned, down to one knee holding tight to a cross that would keep him safe from temptations floating by overhead. You wonder about your lost families and friends. How one wife had died not far from here, how your children are now gone. You wonder again about the things you’ve done and said that hurt, and the things left undone, all to hide from pain. You pray for those betrayed. There may be something out here, lying somewhere in the sand, something you still can find.

creosote and rock
rows of giant wind turbines
peaks far distant

In the violet-pink dim light of dawn, the offshore wind blows away most of the rotting-fish smell and the waves flatten and the gulls stay nearly silent. You make out a few people in the distance wandering, looking, evidently without direction. You think of the land-art installation you’d driven by yesterday, part of the Coachella music festival. A shipping container-sized, reddish-orange metal cuboid, detached from its reflected surroundings, a giant erasure. As foam and detritus begin to glow silver yellow with sunrise, you wonder what that huge chrome cube would look like out there, floating red above the waters.

Desert Sea (painting: acrylic on canvas)

Copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson. All rights reserved.

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults.

Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work two years ago to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023).

His shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef, and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Through a Curatorial Eye: The Apocalypse This Time, an essay and paintings by Kendall Johnson in Issue 19 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (15 Aug. 2023); nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire by Kendall Johnson at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from his memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)