High Horse

Sheafed floes

Sheafed fielded floes

dinner plates

Bluegills stuck in the capsized mizzen

Anthropomorphized geological anomolies

and beasts

Like carvings of ursi maritimi

Bastardized little steamships

Sibilants that fizz

Fricatives that ackth-ackth you

Albatross knockers

on the stateroom door

Taken in flight like

frightened rabbitbrained accountants

Lords of the frozen sea

Statuesque and buttressesque

Kafkaesque and Papaesque

Those two ice caps

skulls on a fat and watery man.

Abarrotes Heber

Everything you ever could want

you can find in the corner grocery store

plastic spoons and gumballs

an ice lolly chest freezer

bags of chile peppers

and chile pepper suckers

crickets fried in garlic

oil vinegar and mayo

soap shampoo conditioner

room temperature pop

sour cream and chorizo

if you are lucky

miltomate jitomate

green serrano red serrano

jalapeño mustard and industrial salsas

Valentina Búfalo Botanera

flip-flops and tp

huge vats of raw chocolate

gummy bears

and towards the back

where the ladies are gathered

stern on their upturned buckets

past the bottles of tourist mezcal

gallon drums of aguardiente and bleach

the nixtamal

ash and hominy mash

for tortillas

where Heber in his tall rubber boots

feeds it through a 90 kg an hour mill

trough, rocks, and nixtamal tray

The dough peeling into a basket

into a black bag in a basket

like a string of gnarly tripe

of the god of the tortilla

sometimes white

sometimes off-purple

who sacrificed himself for us.

No one ever mentions him.

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Colin Gee (@ColinMGee) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. Stories and novellas in The Penult with LEFTOVER Books. His novel Lips with Anxiety Press. Poetry and play out with DUMBO Press.