El Bronco, Durango

By Miguel Soto

Between a scorpion’s stinger of glass and a severed lizard’s tail of topaz, sunset unearths a bridge of bone and a bullet’s shell. My father sets camp alongside a mound of clay. He points to the spine and says: restos de un hombre que nunca trabajó entre tierra que nunca sembró. Dicen que era gay. Mosaic on a desert altar of repose. My father sits closest to the fire as I eat stones behind him, weighing the ghost in my throat. From the fire, an obsidian sculpture chews and spits my silhouette, like a sentence asserting each syllable. Ghost in my throat, or recurring refrain of susurrate grief, thank you for not having a shadow to interrogate, even as sunrise rifts through el campo aridó. Light, bringer of work, may you unearth the song my bones will pronounce amongst the stone.

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Miguel Soto serves as the Book Review Editor and Website Consultant for Jet Fuel Review, an international literary journal housed in Lewis University. In the summer of 2019, he was the recipient of the Wolny Writing Residency. His writings can be found in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, 30 N, The Ekphrastic Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. You can find more from him at www.miguelasoto.com