Writings of Jeffrey Lazos Ferns

  My heart broke in San Francisco, but the crack did not stay in the city where it happened. It traveled with me, tucked behind my ribs, an invisible shard cutting at every breath as the plane lifted off the Bay and carried me back to the desert that made me. By the time I reached Phoenix, the break had become its own weather system: a low, gray pressure that followed me from room to room, seeping into my sleep, my appetite, my judgment. I stopped recognizing myself in mirrors. My skin grew sallow, my thoughts scattered like trash in an alley after the wind had its way. Every night, my body lay down in my own bed, but my spirit refused, pacing somewhere outside, unwilling to come back inside my chest. I kept trying to outthink it: reading articles about trauma, scrolling through strangers’ advice at 2 a.m., counting my breaths like loose change. None of it helped. The susto had lodged itself not just in my mind, but in the quiet places behind my heart where doctors don’t look. N...

  Exploring Camp Naco, the Buffalo Soldiers, and the Seeds of Untold Stories Until very recently, Camp Naco did not exist in my imagination. I had never walked its grounds, never heard its name in history class, never been told that Black soldiers once lived and trained in adobe barracks just yards from the border in southern Arizona. I’d heard “Buffalo Soldiers” in passing, maybe as a lyric, maybe as a phrase floating through American pop culture, but I hadn’t been asked to sit with the complicated human beings behind that name. So when Tanja introduced herself to me at the Arizona Indian Festival and then texted me about Camp Naco, a place she thought I might be interested in, my instinctive response was the one that has guided most of my life: I followed my curiosity. I went on a deep dive, documentaries, Smithsonian archives, PBS specials, trying to wrap my mind around this chapter of history that had somehow been standing in my own region, largely unnoticed by me. What...

  The desert wakes again with the rising temperatures. I can feel it stretching, sighing into the sun, the air turning warm and alive around me. I also wake in the desert heat and feel that deep pull to put memory to keystrokes. I am my truest physical self in the temperatures that soar near and above 100 degrees. The stories, the faces, the pieces of memory that once scattered now begin to weave themselves together in my memoir. The thread isn’t broken anymore; it runs steadily, binding this life, this place, and every word I’ve been meaning to say into one long, continuous journey. This is the journey of a desert boy, a young man, and now an elder. The plants have always been my teachers; now they are my writing companions. Excerpt from Prickly Pear/Cholla Bud chapter- “Think of all the mouths these plants have fed,” I say. “Deer, rabbits, javelina, packrats, insects, birds. People whose names we will never know, whose recipes we will never taste, whose prayers still hang in th...

  Dear Tim, I know why the caged bird sings…. I place a small shard of salt on the altar, and it looks like quiet stars gathered onto a single shore. This is the shore between here and there, between breath and the place where breath slipped away. Beside it, I lay a sprig of creosote, that desert blessing that smells like rain before the clouds arrive, a scent carried from the Sonoran Desert where his family lives and still looks up at monsoon skies. Though he lived far away in Delaware, this is the land that now holds some of the ones who love him; the desert offers its storm-scent as a blanket for their grief. Among them, I place pinecones, small forests gathered on the altar, each scale a door that has already opened once to release its hidden seeds. They carry the shape of renewal and whisper that whatever lies beyond the veil can still open toward light, that endings may become beginnings in a way we cannot yet see. Salt remembers the ocean even when it has been carr...

  Love Letter to the Market The tents rise like small bright prayers in parking lots and side streets, canvas wings catching first light. We walk in holding whatever heaviness the week handed us, and the market takes it without asking for a tip. Here are the tortilla makers, the cheesemakers, the people whose hands are weather reports. Here is cilantro still smelling like soil, chiltepines that look like tiny comets, lettuce with its roots still dreaming in the crate. To walk among the makers is to remember that not everything has been bought and sold. That not all food is barcoded, not all decisions are made in rooms with no windows. It’s the opposite of scrolling—you move at the pace of your feet, not your thumb, and the only algorithm is the rhythm of your own curiosity. Kathy and the Creosote Rabbit Hole At the Arizona Center downtown market, I met a woman named Kathy who makes creosote salve. Her booth smelled like the first rain after a long grief, that desert ...