Poetry by Roxanne Doty

      Marc Stevenson CC




La Loba 

           The girlwoman leaves home on a cigarette-filled night of last calls and all-night diners believing in symbols and stars, the Egyptian ankh of eternal life, the wisdom of wolves and intelligence of ravens, the chill of cold rain courses through her veins, no lines on her face, time not yet burning on her wrist and she travels the wet glistening turnpike of New Jersey, through mountain tunnels of Pennsylvania and all the open blowing fields ahead, rest stops and motels with cheap particleboard dressers and night stands until she reaches a searing desert city of sun and greed where Jesus walks the streets peddling promises to searching souls who stand in the shade of saguaros and can’t remember who they are or how they have become strangers, their words colonized, made hollow and she discovers the factories and classrooms and men with well-shined shoes and choking neckties, salacious half-grins, Bluebeard’s blood in their hearts and she is interrogated relentlessly as to who she is, why she has come, what she will do now and she does not know the many answers to these questions only that she must begin in the desert and the men in neckties demand her words which at the time seem a small price, they are only words and there are so many of them, but she dares not tell them, may not even realize herself, that she is searching for the wolf woman who stands by the highway in Black Canyon City or a Taco Bell in Buckeye, roams the backstreets of border towns, the empty trails across the Sonoran, the shimmering hallways and towers of the universities, the dry river beds and avenues of Phoenix and she encounters a woman in the underpass of a freeway, kneeling in prayer as trucks rumble overhead and another who lives in an old Honda Accord with expired license plates parked on the south side of Planet Fitness and one with tangerine-colored hair who walks along a service road in the early mornings and afternoon rush hours and other women in blazers with shoulder pads and briefcases who live outside their stories and the days and months and years begin to smolder until she finds herself in deep solitude, shattered from simply surviving and desperately holding on to wild instinct buried in her bones and she begins to put herself back together, salvages her lost words, unfiltered, uninterrupted and she looks into a mirror, her face now creased with journey and life and spirit and in the distance a monsoon wind lashes across the desert city, the scent of rain and creosote in the air, the howl of dogs sweeping through her neighborhood and from the reflective glass in front of her La Loba gazes back.

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Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel, Out Stealing Water, was published by Regal House Publishing, August 30. 2022. Her first poetry collection was published by Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. She has published stories and poems in Third Wednesday, Quibble Lit, Superstition Review, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, The Blue Guitar, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, NewVerseNews, International Times, Saranac Review, Gateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review. Her short story, Turbulence (Ocotillo Review) was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart prize for short fiction.