By Anuel Rodriguez

I don’t remember the moment I first realized
other men also carried stampedes of forked
ghosts sewn into layers of their skin. Or took
Picasso’s Guernica in the form of injections.
Bloodstreams becoming slaughterhouse runoff.
The signs are everywhere I look. A tattoo of
an artillery shell on a male ER nurse’s inner forearm.
A salty puddle of whispering blood left on the
pavement. Moonlight shot out on a block darker
than the inside of a white whale’s mouth.
My mother would see tennis shoes hanging
from a wire and say it meant war like a storm
blooming hollow in the gray mind of the wind.

///

I once watched a man, through a black security door,
doing lines of coke on a table: inside of the same kitchen
I used to eat at as a child: inside the same house
with the front yard where my father used to pitch Wiffle
balls for me to hit. The table wasn’t black, but if it had been,
I wonder if it would’ve made me think of a zebra’s back.

///

Two brown boys were recently shot dead
while sitting in a van in the parking lot of a
nearby elementary school. There were a
half a dozen flashes from a weapon firing
on them and it was all caught on footage by
a neighbor’s surveillance camera. Now people
leave white candles near the spot where the boys’
muted light fell and cracked our hearts into
flocks of migratory birds. Some say even their
guardian angels were donning bulletproof vests.

///

I can still see horses pasturing in the hills:
one white one and three brown ones that
appear black under the swollen rose gray clouds.
I wonder if they can feel the cold imprint
of the neighborhood on their coats. In my
head I can hear their hoof beats which sound
more like giant men taking axes to bone.
I imagine their past lives being transformed
by raw heat. Their brains turning into black glass.
Their heads becoming burning voids of matter
and woodsmoke. Their vitrified fragments
like abstract shadows hardened from the bitter
ashes of consciousness. Each becoming another
exit wound to shape in our names. Or another weapon
for us to hold against the bulbed throat of the sun.

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Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, DREGINALD, decomP, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.