In this paper, I compare poems by the Tohono O’odham scholar and poet, Ofelia Zepeda, and Arizona-based authors Susan Briante and Joy Williams. I argue that each author lyrically and linguistically elaborates forms of sovereignty based on their respective geographical imagination, and that these political and ethical differences are artifacts of each author’s relationship to the desert. While each author works against the idea of the contemporary nation state as constituted by borders and state violence, I argue that a closer look at their texts shows fundamental differences regarding ideas of relation, belonging, desert ecology, and sovereignty, all of which hinge on their understanding of the Sonoran Desert as either full and creative, or empty and destructive. For Briante and Williams, the desert is a violent space whose parameters are determined by the twinned ideologies of empire and patriarchy. Their critiques push against these ideologies, but do not question—and indeed end up reifying—the concept of the desert as a fundamentally empty, inhospitable space. On the other hand, for Zepeda, being part of the Tohono O’odham people, although their lands are sundered by the U.S.-Mexico border, means continuing to insist upon and lyrically express the importance of the freedom of movement (such as journeying from the desert to the ocean) in conjunction with describing and inhabiting traditional lands. Working through her lyrics of creation and inhabitation, I show how rather than an empty desert devoid of life, Zepeda’s poetry of the Sonoran Desert—her O’odham—is full of stories that live, breathe, walk, and speak through acts of creation and inhabitation. In undertaking this comparative work, I hope to contribute to the emergent methods of Comparative Desert Studies, thinking in coalition with theorists of the Maghreb, decoloniality, diaspora, and migration. Although it is important to understand how the desert has functioned as a colonial space—specifically within the U.S., Mexican, and Western European imaginaries—it is time to turn to indigenous writers from and of the desert. This in turn helps us see deserts and their cultural ecologies as capacious, creative spaces.