Paul’s Reviews > Beast Meridian > Status Update

From a poem entitled Border Semiotics, “Rags of clotted blood on bone on Walmart tee-shirt threaded with work on raw hand & wood brained in silver bloody tooth cloth missing chancla a packed truck toward the destiny star to enter the gold pear night, ghosts in an elk eye, land of cold evenings”

In fire, we discover our human parts: hooves split into toes then fuse again, hair unravels from buffalo heads, bristled fur recedes, regrows in the dark. We scarcely remember our flesh forms, or recognize our ownership.

O bruise of Christ, O flowering scar, bless this station & let my truck barrel through the night, so dense with lust so that the honey bourboned stack of coins in my mouth will open the world cloaked between shifts of hard dark my scrap eighteen wheeler dream drum charging the road dotted with stars no love found in the headlights

Nice men are never nice when they are starving if they ask you who is waiting en el otro lado for you tell them no one that every step is a prayer for the impossible pay the coyote this amount put the rest asi in your panties put it even where love cannot cross but mija you are loved our prayers will protect you this land has always belonged to you don't cry don't be afraid don't cry no llores no tengas miedo

The stranger children who too much resemble you/ my inarticulate love/ lately all I remember/ of your face/ is the back of your head/ as you walk away/ I lay next to/ a body of absence/ so untouched am I