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.
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.
High Horse 