Marfa Lights
       

There they are—our fears, animated. Highway 90's wide shoulder, into it, we cry. The scary thing about fear is that it hovers, remains stationary as it pulses on & off. A roadside sign here says Crunch instead of Church, despite the steeple's persistence, & like the sun, everything has slowed to a crawl in West Texas except in the way we name things: will-o'-the-wisp, bad hombre, small fires. In the way language fails at documenting our corruptions, the lights appear as a lesson in scattering. Who moved the backbone of Texas? Was it the Spanish, or was it the U.S.? Did Mexico have a say? Who carved Fuck this into the desk I used in junior high school history class? I'd love to meet them, ask them why their crude artwork looked so much like an abandoned asylum wall. Saltwater seeped into the bones of Galveston trees, killed 40,000 of them, & they're calling it an ecological disaster. I want to know what this feeling is in my bones, if it's saltwater killing me, or if it's something else, & if this something else has a name that lessens its intensity like domestic violence. How he moved my smile as if it were a Texas backbone. Ask me if I had a say in which rivers separated one state from another. The town where my mother was born, which had the largest sulfur deposits, now depleted & left ghost. The Lone Star has always gambled on disorientation, & it usually wins.

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Copyright © 2022 Iliana Rocha All rights reserved
from The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez
Tupelo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission