All the Terrible Things Will Become Tumbleweed

The old house of empire is groaning at the beams.

Becoming Beautiful Barbarians is a poetry collection written from the threshold between collapse and re-enchantment—carrying wild kin, unraveling empires, deep-time trust, and the dangerous act of remaining openhearted in a burning world.

Here’s a glimpse into one dimension of it—an animist anti-imperial fairy tale of ecological return from the borderlands. Written near the U.S.–Mexico border wall, Arizona.

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Huff and Puff
(All the Terrible Things Will Become Tumbleweed)

I huff and I puff to blow the house down.

The house wears a white picket fence
a rusty iron curtain
a prison wall, a stale tale

a slave patrol
pretty plastic flowers
and an unacknowledged darkness
in the basement of things—

my lungs bellow
but find no purchase on its ramparts

I am politely ushered back inside
for some sweet lemonade

the house has many tricks and treats—
so much sugar, yet tastes of death

So I invoke Wind—

I huff and puff
I paw and claw

Raven caws.

Lands on the barbed wire, winking.

This house fell out of a tornado
a sucking storm of hungry ghosts
a hurricane of hubris

landing on all the good witches
on Plymouth Rock
on the desert tortoise

It paid no heed to the sacred river
crashed right down on right relation
and the seventh generation—

they’re not in the constitution of this house.

I huff and I puff.
I sneeze and wheeze.

Wolf disappeared here.

Along with bear and pronghorn
condor and elders
so many other pilgrims.

But ancient kin
are again on the horizon.

Put your ears down to the ground
and you’ll know it to be so.

Dams are falling all around us.

Look! A gorgeous storm is gathering.

Cumulus clouds know no border.
Water flows heedless of empire.
Condor’s stretching arc greets us—
holding the horizons-eye-view

Dear Butterfly, mighty monarch
delicate and deep-timed—

your pilgrimage beyond
these petty border wars—

you too are an Elder
we reach for right now.

Hail River’s freedom.
Hail Seeds amidst debris.
Hail return of the canine crew.

Will you be wild-winged with me
and migrate the miraculous?

Will you be a good wolf with me
and blow this wicked house down?

Perhaps you, me, butterflies and exiled packs
tortoise queens and lizard monks
salmon and condor clan
will form a rebel alliance with Wind

For Wind has muscle
and a thousand faces
eroding empires into dust

As the old prayer says—
“Come like the wind and cleanse.”

Yes, the house will fall

A dismantling, then—
a tumbleweed revelry in celebration

not of victory,
but of return.

In the meantime,

we continue to huff and puff—

from our bellyroot
through our hybrid fangs

with delicate wings
and unconquerable lungs.

We have deep time on our side—

all the terrible things
will become tumbleweed

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Included in Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a chrysalis of poems for those practicing how to stay permeable, imaginative, and alive during the strange unraveling.

These poems wander through composting empire, ancestral belonging, volcanic Yeses, roadside sutras, dragon ethics, and dreams of Butterfly Earth.

Monarchs migrate across multiple generations.
No single butterfly completes the journey.

Perhaps liberation works similarly.

If you’d like to be among the first to know when it arrives later this summer, you can join the list.

In the meantime, if you’d like to wander through other earthy poetry collections, you can find them here.