mission/HORSES Tonight, whenever I’m too parched to mouth it, I have not belonged to you: province of hardening bandwidth, inbound call from automated lady in her steel pre-fabricated hangar near the desert airport, this creditor in sequined ball cap, rubbing her arms raw in the jet noise of summer monsoons I can’t hear the final notice for my own rapid decays I can’t stand this perceived water on my skin Here is what happens when Sears decides not to even poinsettia, so late that you can listen to the westside wrecks at the midnight drag — no, mission horses might be what I hear Province of that Spanish-born widow burying her servant’s child, what remnant rain you pump upstream THE SPANISH TRAIL MOTEL The air assault of trumpets & sugar on fire, squeak of reconsidered frettings The plaza at the center of this corn production is in pandemonium I cross & pass the engridments of the historic zone guarded by a greenish projection, who bears a shadowed crease horizontally across his brow, who doesn’t carry protoplasmic passport proof I want to ask Young Boris Karloff to wait outside this dress shop while I pay respects to the famed 1:1 scale figurine inside, whose uncorrupted silence has a country voice, whose long range eyes drift imperceptibly the panoramic circuit of windows endemic to this zone, a migration mannequin to mortal flesh we’ve both ignored over a span of cold phases & floods it would hurt both our feelings to know, pretty much Gray, perfectly gruesome, real hands Boris tells me watermelon used to have black seeds, what happened to the snails & the toads, they don’t come out anymore with the rain We had servants, we were ranch folk, you swung the hen’s neck like this because you loved her Coming from a high & lovely child voice What safe war to soldier, slow-motion pyrotechnic traffic set to mute I just need a name I can convincingly pronounce, I need a full body balaclava I need a hologram to call me brother, still life corpse-bride mother The shutter comes rolling down, drawn from inside, our ancestral statuette stabs a key blind into a miserable antique car, with those hard hands, a stolen car with hieroglyphic impound markings on the windshield the clouds go tintype and the city sounds a rattle but the key turns over & the engine pulls its lower half from the tar in the direction of the noise Imagine unraveling that
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Gabriel Palacios holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. His work picks over the posthistoric. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from West Branch, Typo, Territory, The Volta, Bayou Magazine, Pulpmouth, and Spoon River Poetry Review.