Plants annual, with a soft base. Flowering stems 30–100 cm long, glabrous. Leaf blades 1–4 mm wide, folded along the midvein or inrolled, glabrous or roughened on the upper surface. Leaf sheaths glabrous or hairy, rarely somewhat woolly. Glumes about equal in length, the body 10–13 mm long, 1‑nerved, roughened along the midnerve, the tip with an awn 2–5 mm long. Lemmas with the body 7–12 mm long, glabrous, the awns shed eventually, jointed at the tip of the lemma (a line visible across the base of the short awn column at the attachment point to the lemma), circular in cross‑section, about equal in length, 20–35 mm long, spirally coiled loosely at the base and spreading. 2n=22. August–October.

Uncommon, known only from Scott County (Illinois to Louisiana west to Nebraska and Texas). Fallow fields (disturbed sand prairie), on deep sand.

This rare species was first reported for Missouri by McKenzie (1995), who noted thousands of plants in the single population that he located. He interpreted the station to represent a highly disturbed remnant sand prairie. The following year, the population was decimated by renewed farming, and it remains to be seen whether it will recover in the future.

The related A. tuberculosa Nutt., which also grows in deep, sandy soils, should be searched for in northeastern Missouri (Steyermark, 1963). It occurs mostly along the Atlantic Coastal Plain from Maine to Florida, but it also grows at scattered inland sites from Michigan to Minnesota, south to Indiana and Iowa. This species resembles A. desmantha in its jointed awn column but differs in that the column is longer (7–15 vs. 2–6 mm), as are the glumes (20–28 vs. 12–18 mm, including the awn).