The magpie flirts with the tamarisk branches,
flashing white stripes as he flips back his wings.
He perches. His black tail twitches nervously,
and his head cocks, watching me pitch my tent.
Our ancestors migrated here,
His earlier, mine more recently, both uninvited.

I rehydrate dinner. Soon, it will be dark.
The bird is alert, perhaps seeking a place
To roost for the night, or perhaps
Disturbed by my presence.

The sun angles through the leaves
in isolated beams, picking out my stove,
a tent stake, and my meal.
The magpie searches for something to steal.

I clean dishes and teeth, crawl into my tent,
adjusting my foam pad and sleeping bag
to avoid tree roots inevitably unavoidable.
Feathery tamarisk brushes against the rainfly
As the stars gradually appear.

Intruders all, magpie, tamarisk, and human
settle into the dusk, as the temperature drops
and the canyon winds pick up.
I shiver. The tamarisk rustles. The magpie has vanished.

We do not belong here.

Sophie, the old
egg woman, lived alone
in the sagging farmhouse across
the road from our modest suburban development.

Once a week, sometimes
more, my mother would send me
over to buy still-warm eggs from Sophie,
because she was too creeped out to do it herself.

Sophie’s fingernails
were always broken short and
packed with dirt. Dirt caulked the creases
in her weathered, widowed farmwife’s face too.

Her dark farmhouse was
a hovel—at least what I could see of it,
peeking in—and she wore heavy clothes even
in summer, so she usually didn’t smell too nice either.

But Sophie’s
brown, speckled eggs—
of all different sizes and shades—
tasted, when scrambled in butter, like nectar of life.

Then one morning,
as our family devoured eggs
bought only a few days earlier, my mother told us
that Sophie, two nights before, had passed away in her sleep.

And that the demolition
of her farmhouse, planned around
this long-awaited occasion, would occur
the following month so that a new housing development could go in.

At first, I confess,
I was privately relieved,
as a balky chore had just
been removed from my life.

Then, later that week, my mother
came home from the grocery store with
a carton of cold eggs, all pure white, all the same
size, all lined up like a tasteless suburban development.

Imagine
my surprise
when I found

that it creeped me out.