Apostates

By Edwin Alanís-García

After Tom Kiefer’s Rosaries 42, Neutral

Sunblistered skin processed, almost chewed
at the gate. God once rolled in plastic
stones, each pebble a prayer carried across
2,000 kilometers of Nod. They all must go
into the evidence box, even this faux chain,
this trinket tradeable at a roadside stand
for twenty pesos. Now it’s the last kiss
from Mamá and Papá, a thin bulwark
of flaking gold paint, sweat-stained ribbon.
These beads rattle and His tongue is caught
in the clouds. All those childhood hymns
modulate into curses. Cracked hands
smelling of children and sewage. Brackish
eyes. Barbed wire. Scalding gravel rebukes. All in
doppelgänger language, venom and saccharine,
the cascabel and its kin in varied guises guide
a way to the promised land, where promises
always demand payment. This molded crucifix
was the ticket when the tolls became depraved.
Another indulgence purchased. God looks
the other way. Until concrete pillars become sanctuary.
This rosary vanishes, swallowed by new deities: Procedure.
Standard. Serpents sing in the walls, scrape the bars.
Iron songs burst into red dust. Those guard towers,
the black domes on the ceiling—echoes of what
Mother and Father used to say, that no matter where
you are, someone is always watching.

Edwin Alanís-García is the author of the chapbook Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Their poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review, The Kenyon Review, Peripheries, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program and the Harvard Divinity School, they divide their time between small-town Illinois and small-town Nuevo León.