Beneath the Naked Mountain

by Ariel Machell

Frankie Lopez

for Collin

That night, at midnight, young and wild, we ran naked across the golf course beneath the moldering mountain lit by resort lamps in Palm Springs, and we looked at each other’s impressionable bodies and said, Let’s pray, not because we believed in anything in particular, but because the warm night air was caressing our exposed flesh in such a way that we felt we had to worship something in return. We had been so loud and it was time to be quiet. We knelt in the perfectly groomed lawn, made ourselves small and rounded like fresh graves, and stayed there with our faces pressed into the grass until we had weaving lines across our cheeks, the kind you get from a good nap in a field, and I could smell the citrus from the oranges we peeled that afternoon preserved beneath our fingernails, a sweet breeze like a whisper of bat wings stirring the hair by our ears as we worshipped the mountain with its artificial glow, praying for what neither of us can now say, but I swear as we lay there I heard all our dead poems speaking at once, saying, There will be more of us to bury, and it felt like a sweet promise and not a terrible premonition. After a long while, we rose together and sprinted back to the house your parents owned to jump into the pool, submerging ourselves in the inescapable light of that water, the slick weightless embrace, and when we freed ourselves you wrote down, It’s summer and the fruit bats aren’t eating, then buried the note away.

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Ariel Machell (she/her) is a poet from California. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon in 2021. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Northwest Review. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, and is published or forthcoming in The McNeese Review, The Pinch, SWWIM, The Shore, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere.