Harry Edgar Palacio
Somewhere in between the two lines a firing ground. An axis of earth spiraling into silence. Those missing teeth pulled from adolescence kept for posterity’s sake. I spent the night plumbing the ichor seas: god’s bloodline, milk, or amrita. Watching its pulse rise and fall on the hour. Its heft like the weight of angels. Words around hips or across lips like ephemera ducats we use for a lifetime that will not carry us into any celestial places. I was rummaging through the dog-eared moments of my past-life which made me brusquely nod off into the afterlife. As I imagine the near dying do with their glassy eyes of contemplation rocking back and forth in time barely moving. A sort of ghost travel through towns and cities where we meet our strangers and lovers over and over again like a row of dice sent into oblivion with its incestuous faces. Reworking history in our brief life its snake-like song uncoiling like a catacomb of forgotten libraries. There is not much of a guarantee in this experience we call life. Its granular accommodation of living and dying. We can see time as a beige or pastel wall, and we are the painters exhausting the supply of paint. In another life we could go to a store and buy forest-green paint and continue another wall somewhat like the wall we were painting. Some say the self always paints the wall and the memory of painting it always exists. Some say that we are here to paint a forest of walls in a collective mansion. I might say it is not just paint. I collect my things and wonder at the rarity of life. The analogy of past lives and meaning of life which remain brief and vague. I take a drag from a cigarette and wonder this time how brief? Its syncopated breath tressed with jazz and nude terrestrial fires. In the sapphire heat of earth naked in a lagoon where the youths couple up and find a place to grow old together. Its half-light like crimson enameled teeth. Singing along to madness. Its sensibility like the rattlesnake’s row of inner teeth swallowing the world itself. The passing by of time like mute phonetic gestures of hands-on bare stomachs watching the tiny hairs glisten like peach lightning. There are gods in a silent peck, an overcast kiss, burnt ochre misspellings waiting for signs in jazz, aquamarine brothers and sisters, half pear-shaped bodies wrapped in other bodies. The weight of touch turning on its axis pushing itself eternally up a hill, upward and back like the body in its own trajectory. The buzz of homeostasis like the pull of want measured in small increments calling on a need to its highs then lows like a reminder we are all children of our own devices. The needle and the thorn. Its hapless kiss turned tentacle arm to take a drag of sea-green smoke. The wish for the same greedy puff is helpless. We walk the past up the hill tirelessly until it reaches the bottom again. Sisyphus is mentioned in memory then forgetting his name and place of birth. Satiated by the process of search but not enough to quit the act entirely. Its endless loop a wildfire of reciprocity. Sometimes ruminating on the consciousness of forget, longings remind us it is still raining tiny blessings. I noticed you somewhere in a collection of thoughts that kept me from moving from house to house like a song that refuses to stop playing. As though jazz were calling me from a different room its beige hum like a visitation. Waiting to number the walls filled with a snow-white horned Minotaur as I remembered the sort of offhand commentary that life is like a sepia film. When that horned bull arrived, I accommodated him by the couch with the frills, peanut butter chocolate, Coca Cola, and popcorn. We were watching the story of my life, weren’t we? It went dark and I will not ruin the ending for you, not this time.
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Harry Edgar Palacio has been accepted to be published in Rigorous, Tule Review, Apiary, Storm Cellar, Quail Bell, Ice Colony, and elsewhere. Harry has a chapbook “Ambrosia” (Finishing Line Press) 2019 and a book Sutras of Tiny Jazz (Finishing Line Press) due to be released March 2021. He has a Master of Education from Manhattanville College. He worked as an assistant director of a social justice center. Harry was an art teacher in the Dominican Republic. His parents are immigrants, his mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father is Colombian. He has performed his poetry at Embark Gallery, Peekskill Open Studios, One Billion Rising, and Energy Movement Center Studio. He also lives with schizoaffective disorder.