The winter I came to the desert
I insisted that the stars that flickered
too much or too brightly
were drones.

In Tucson,
I slept on the roof.
My dreams were punctuated
with the buzzing of helicopters.

When I was a child I learned
the names of the constellations
inside an inflatable dome in the
school auditorium.
Orion, The Big Dipper,
Cassiopeia,
pointed out on the plastic sky.
They felt real then.
But these nights the mythologies of the sky
are bugged and wired,
obscured by searchlights,
and the stars look so much like drones
that I can’t parse them out.

(Even the constellations seem
complicit:
Orion’s bow drawn
and loaded with arrows made
by human hands.)