These poems are excerpted from a series in progress currently titled “Alva and the Beast.” This project, through its central character Alva, explores tropes of passion, longing, loss, and mortality through the lens of nature and technology—and how these two forces, increasingly intertwined and blurred in contemporary society, can challenge, generate, and define narratives of self as well as our relationships with one another. Alva On Getting Dumped in the Desert It was the last home she’d chosen for herself, though the air gave her nosebleeds: blood suddenly on the sofa pillows—a few drops that would never wind their way back to the heart. But still. The air made her bleed. The desert sky a low ceiling. The altitude of the city higher than the mountains of her hometown, where lush trees clambered up the slopes. When he’d taken her …
