The Boabs in Broome, Western Australia

By Nick D’Annunzio Jones

Whence came the boab                                      rooted in religious rust

twisted Outback landmark                     a comatose crucifix

impaled on the nihilist horizon                     a few felty bulbs

Christmas, dangling off              limbs myriad, deciduous

trunk bottle-bloated   botanical elephantiasis?

           Aboriginals answer                                                                         with a dreamtime dream: god

rejected the hellish trees                                                                    angrily speared them,

tops first, into the earth

where ripped up rhizomes,

splayed like Yazuka fingers,

gorgonian (Google it)

fry, as branches

under the dry

infinite

ocean

sky.

Nick D’Annunzio Jones  is a writer in South Florida. He received his MFA from the University of California at Riverside. He has taught at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and at Lynn University, in Boca Raton, FL. Currently, he is studying Soto Zen Buddhism, works as a hospice caregiver and volunteers with the PEN prison-writing program. His non-fiction and criticism has appeared in Salon, Details, Popular Culture and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in Gargoyle.