Our Lady of Perpetual Desert

"Winner of the regional 2021 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, Alexandra Martinez's Our Lady of the Perpetual Desert sings out to an America that is both foreign and home, a place where the gold of citrus is tarnished by sacrifice, where to be American is to cast off who you really are. "America": "While you were asleep me and your dad sang all of American Pie him in the front seat me in the back and it made me want to cry because I wanted him to know how much I wanted to be what he wanted me to be but all he says is bye bye miss American Pie I wanted to tell him about the girl with skin browner than me and how we'd drive around in her little blue scoot scoot with this exact song playing loud and all the windows down to let winter remind us that we were still walking along the edge of a levy of the mind but all he said was bye bye miss American Pie and I am trying to explain to him that there were plenty of us girls raised on tortillas y los Beatles and that we love this goddamn country eternally we love the frost on the pines and we love the desert needles and we'd seen so much more of America than he would ever see that we've been on all the highways and ran out of cars screaming like banshees about how much we loved these stars but I can't say any of this so instead I bake him the goddamn best American Pie he eats it all and still says bye bye"--