A Desert Graveyard

by Minyoung Lee

Cajin Clement

The problem with these dried up shrubs isn’t that they aren’t beautiful. They are beautiful in a way that makes city people leave their manicured lawns in Beverly Hills for entire weekends to bask in this unforgiving heat and deathly cold. The problem with these dried up shrubs is that they are stuck, because once upon a time millions of years ago, this land here was an ocean, and then it dried up over the course of those millions of years. Now all that water is gone. It’s not like these shrubs could have uprooted themselves from the hundred-and-ten-degree sand and drive away in a beaten-up RV to a different patch of land with black dirt and water. They’re just here and it’s not their fault because it’s the land that decided to turn on them. But they’ve always been beautiful, these shrubs. The hints of green under the dust that accumulates for months before the annual drop of rain, the fuzzy rodents they let nestle between their roots, the thorns on their branches to protect them from the men who can’t help but step on them to see if they’ll continue to thrive. These shrubs are beautiful. After all these years in this dear desert, she could finally see this clearly.

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Minyoung Lee lives in San Francisco, CA with her well-traveled calico cat, Matisse. Her work appears in Monkeybicycle, Vestal Review, JMWW, and others. Minyoung is a Tin House Summer Workshop Alum and a Fear No Lit Submerging Writer Fellow. Her website is https://myleeis.com/.