Henry Oso Quintero is a very mean man. He likes guns. He lives alone a ranch outside of Tyrone, NM. He eats rabbit, and snake and horse meat regularly... Or so the Hollywood version of Henry's life would go. In reality Henry is a native New Mexican, from a generation of landed, college educated mestizos who annually reclaim their ancestral lands through rituals of poetry and song.

    opening febrile opening again apocryphal mirror

    we are inside no harm

    will come traipsing

    her golden hairs engagingly provocative inseminate

    the opening again penetrate the sacred space of her

    Never the midnight vibrates until a wine glass
    breaks. The train twists
    off track. Unslaked, mistaken claims
    flash the cabin like a camera. The future maims

        "Age is a short word for a long sag,"
        she spat. Then sat in still birth sigh,
        an envelope with wetted chin,
        as words just fit because they do,
        twist a stanza to its close.
        Her hair, a thick mosquito net,

        Familiar with this fallen moon,
        I ask you point cold blank:
        "Do you drink every night?"
        An answer, the hangnail of silence,
        bleeding color, forming crust.
        Conversation peeling back
        as if it hit pedestrians,

The meditating man leaps up from his spot and yells, "piss on it!"
The Nuns are benumbed, but act in accordance with the Prefect's wishes and dispose of the meditating man's spot. Colors blur from the eyes of the meditating man, creating a sulfuric mist, difficult to drive through and

    Maybe you've seen them: red-necked and meaty,
    one is always shaved, articulate and sinister--
    he's the meanest; the other is fat with a beard
    he's been growing since the land run. I'm standing
    on a rocky shore casting my 39 cent Walmart jig

    1.

    Painful as it is to admit, I like your shoes.
    The soft leather sheen soothes my rough
    exterior, eyelids. She said something
    like this; I can only imagine
    it stemmed from a deep-seated foot
    fetish. Beneath the table, her toes
    curled round my laces, unfastening me.
    In the room tension was thick
    like cake. The dinner theatre crowd
    poured in, men decked out in lavender
    suits, women wore sharkskin jackets.

    I am writing this thank you with the pen
    you sent me for my birthday. It is a nice,
    new pen. It glides so smoothly, and the ink
    does not run. As people walk by, I see them
    eye my new pen, its sleek, black curves
    like a woman's thigh. I hear a wife remark
    to her husband, "how gratuitous." A young
    boy gasps with wonder at how smoothly

In the crystal ball
It was like midsummer tarmac waves
When King Louis the XIV, the last solar lord ruling,
Had seen Cortés gazing intently
Into snails bubbling in salt.