Cannizzo & Doyle-Gillespie — August 2026

E. Doyle-Gillespie and Jeanne Cannizzo traded art and words. Jeanne shared this image, titled “Mojave,” with E.:

In response, E. wrote this poem:

The Desert Chapter of Your Memoir

You can start the story with
her red dress left half-dead
across the back of
the room’s only wooden chair.
Say that it has come undone from
her dusky dun skin and the
runaway coal train of her hair.
Say that it waits with patience
as she paces naked,
save for Aztec jewellery
and those black-strap Cuban shoes
she wears to dance class.
Say that it waits in the revenant scent
of her lavender bath.
Say that it plays the role of
a red-rock mesa in
the story that she tells
about her father and
the long desert drives.
Make sure to type her
halting way of talking
when she says
“Dad had a 1951 Hudson that
his Dad left to him.
He would take his time
to wash and shine and drive
it up from Vegas
to the Moapa River Reservation
with all of us dressed up in the back.
Then he would ‘drive slow
for the Navajo.’
He would say that dumb little
rhyme of his as he passed
a roadside stand of beads
and feathers,
a blanket peddler.
‘Just gotta’put on a show
for them Navajo ,’
he would say as he
feathered the pedal at
20 miles per hour.”
Finally – and you must
get this part right,
so write and rewrite
if you must –
how she plucks up
the red mesa,
her newly-washed second skin.
Peeling it on, she mutters
something raspy and flat
about taking back what
she told you that morning.
When she took your cup
and spooned your coffee with agave,
you heard her say
“Actually, on second thought,
if you can help it,
never tempt the desert.”

* * * * *

E. shared this poem with Jeanne:

A Cypress Tree Remembers

Twists itself up to find 

the same shattered sunlight 

prisms through the overcast canopy.

Learns to run its roots above 

the subsiding soil, still plying 

the earth for the richest loam.

Recalls recruiting dense, red rivulets 

that ran from its thick middling limb

on the day that the white men 

brought the accused from town.

They claimed its middle branch

as their own. 

Tested it with the full pull-up weight

of a grown, hooded man,

made an oath,

and chose to use baling wire 

instead of rope.

In response, Jeanne made this image, titled “Hanging Man”: