GABRIEL PALACIOS

THE SPANISH TRAIL MOTEL/on the lossiness

The lamps & gold upholstered
barstools stacked against
green city bins

Wood paneling plastered
an illegible mask you meant to say

something before these paint fumes flame out too

on your
forgetting

while you can receive a visitation
in the radiating dark

lit by a lily

clutched by a child

You slept & slept when you got there

THE SPANISH TRAIL MOTEL

A pivotal murder on your mother’s side
Changed by the telling
The first time felt like space itself
Sucking off your helmet
You needed to lie down somewhere
In a grand piano
Darkly charred
Here
On your plate
In the luncheonette light
Falsifying your mother’s hand
Is your clutch of un-awarded medals
Here’s a language for the bus
Here’s the terminus of timelines
March in carpet slippers
Board like
Any widow
Burying her servant’s child

old town crime map

I put together where you worked
from the handbill
writ reversely on the dressing room mirror
of a polaroid
I spent one night deciphering

I knew that place
I knew it
another way, an orchard tore through it,
torch singing from that thicket of coyotes
hangs over this hour—
gunpowder, unpaintable by sin or illusion—
a dead nebula

Does it matter,
having come this distance that I wander
onto backlot, through performance
never meant
for public view? You thumb
the wad of money
in an envelope, lips flutter hushed
in calculation, swiveling your gaze
Your hair’s a made up color but it’s real long,
a scribble
Rind can’t cede its severed branch, no seed,
no breath, I have a tongue— it buckles
under juice-tastes of eradication, of olympic-sized pools

I feel this
& I flush down what
I feel, the swollen
yellow shipping crate of fish presumed extinct
I hate that I will never add on anything apart from all this
cycling out

That you can only cast me out soft
blank-eyed automata
at your slurring church bell to a stand
of earthen-looking bricks, a quaint old town
erected where eventually they’d give up
altogether on the railroad
wouldn’t they

Do I ever stop running from the slide
whistle marching band
to piss against the wall
of the historic
presidio & if I duck
inside the house & turn the lights off
will the dogs have any pretext, any warrant

edith

This night has been the slow dissolving
Back tattoo that says how
Life is pain / I want to be insane,
In Spain, or extirpated, bred, reintroduced
To Edith Street,
Burnt circuit of forgetting
How to walk
When wasted
In between jails guy snatches off
The lid of my styrofoam container
At a taco truck picnic bench
After the bars let out
To use for a plate to share his meal with his friend—
Real jail violation shit I just let happen

For we wrestle not with flesh & blood
But against principalities, against powers, against
The rulers of the darkness of this world,
Against

Admitting to myself
I watch from half dead airspace
The way Nana answers doors to medics naked
Your days of sticking up laundromats to fund
More research of Morgellons disease
& mine in thrall to spiritual blight
We settle over
All the same harmonic intervals same islands same canals monorails same ravished public
Areas

The quaint aesthetic boneyards

Gabriel Palacios received his MFA at the University of Arizona (poetry). His work picks over the posthistoric. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from West Branch, Typo, Territory, The Volta, Bayou Magazine, Pulpmouth, Contra Viento, and Spoon River Poetry Review.