GABRIEL PALACIOS
CHANNEL DRIFT
When my life’s alright and I’m caught up enough with work I might
listen to the scanner.
Each channel of the system’s monitored very very closely.
If one is compromised, they change it or come find you.
—Welcome to Spice World. My name is Cinnamon Steve. This train takes us on a 360
degree orbit around—
Perhaps you’ve visited this theme park with your family. Or do you hide that.
It’s not as if we see you as some big time
anarchist.
It felt like coming out a summer matinee into the night the last time I tuned in.
I caught one of those footnote headline moments live: a boy who staged his life
from the motels across
the street, who’d smuggled himself onto
park grounds in a box
of chips, fed by a checked-out custodian into the box crusher.
The custodian (hydrocephalic) unknowing, heard proposing
some erotic juxtaposition of his brain shunt and the dispatch
woman’s amputation scar. Chirp.
Chirp embeds the
news down deep inside the wet and pleasant
soil of our cultural illiteracy as well as any old
Italian-American auteur you can name,
but the custodian can’t hear it over the
miraculous unthawing of Gwen
at the complaint desk,
who responds
so gamely
because she cannot hear.
It’s winter. You can stare at things until they disappear. At nothing until things
materialize.
Are you supposed to buy the doll the cancer man tricks into your hands at the
Mexican restaurant. I made
bargains with everyone to
just stay out here in not-quite-California. A fetus swimming in thalidomide, debt and yet
unquenched to something you can sprinkle on a cigarette.
There’s a YouTube channel a guy runs of the feed from video court.
The public defenders bargain defeatedly. I watch it like a mirror.
The accused appear restrained or free depending
on what they believe to be the true gravity of their circumstances,
which is to say their odds to slip away from them.
A Frito-Lay guy stops to stock machines in someone else’s static everyday
upon this earth.
[gestures at the breakroom Christmas lights] Why have all this shit if you’re not gonna
get high
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*** ** ***
NEW LOOKALIKE
Bestial afternoon to be a part of
The lady on vacation
Visits daily with
The quiet of an uncontacted boy
At an invisible table off the register
Folding forks and knives in napkins
I don’t want to be alive anymore
I’m seventeen my skin is luminescent
And I can’t stop laughing
I’m afraid to
Lob my skull into the gateway
Metamorphosis she’ll never
Locate markings of
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*** ** ***
NIGHTS ABOVE GRASS
I’ve cast mine— paperwork & everything—
with Princess Anastasias,
teenage craigslist obstetricians, mindset pastors’
bespoke suits like varicolored sea freight.
And with these panadería tongs, I’ve arranged choices—
so much excised tissue writhes on tin trays,
dent-flecked from being targeted. At checkout
some conveyor blood won’t merit
the desultory eye.
We’re meant to be delighted by the pull—
foam trays of skirt steak, wooden skewers, white
devotional candles, coconut cream pudding mix submit
to bell tones, coin noise, the membranous Food City bags
peeled off by blue-veined hands and arms sleeved
in wintry aftershave and Sears mohair; this neatly
put-together old cashier who coughs
in streaks of rust like new old stock intercoms,
whose cuff brushes the lip of the conveyor,
snags a roller, and gets sleeves
then body swallowed in the works
up to his neck—
No one’s worried.
And the line has slithered out to the meat.
“Can you fix it?” I ask his neck and head.
“Why would I?”
I think that every time I drag
my blue recycle bin in the dark to the edge
of the property to play
myself.
I trust this current system of cartoons painted from memory
on cinderblock piñata shop,
steaming origin-gore off the dollar,
named for daughters.
Nevaeh, be for real now:
for how many puddings would you make me disappear?
Tonight in varicolored sea freight bricks,
the mannequins I didn’t add to cart dock
anyway—
fouled up with a stevedore’s
tattoos. The sun don’t chill.
I thought I’d dodge it—
tabulation in your book
of needs, naked, dressed like a magician’s
new assistant.
Is this whole night drive desire and not need,
ghost merchant angel, this prismatic
self-enucleation
offering to help me see the indefatigable city
inside city,
as it glows
with my
entire body.
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*** ** ***
ENLARGED STAR
The cassette evangelists of the chaotic early universe
would rent somebody’s laser
to perform glib circumcisions, fuck
through special garments. Through the stack of stained-glass
stations of the cross, I felt watched, this skin
behind my neck
right now’s on fire.
Who threw the stack of stained glass stations of the cross
In the street?
Man, I don’t care who did it. I just want to know.
Also:
stop playing games
Stop trying to get all of us arrested just so you can thank a cop.
Trying to stage some Jokeresque last stand.
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*** ** ***
ARE YOU READY
A dude dressed up in travel plaza souvenir-wear
and lady draped in fiberglass are on
each other’s nerves in line
from poor proximity,
hot friction.
Their drone drone dialogue so
doom-scroll-scripted,
O you wish that you could help,
albeit psychically.
Inside. (Don’t make me say it!—
that you think what happens in
your brain counts.)
Look:
your life’s alright.
You have tequila
and you haven’t had
to drink it.
You’re the patient
In a hospital that’s going out for business.
Vapor-poem. Green screen. Taste
just like a tongue depressor voguing in its paper sleeve.
Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday love
Leather pants dance flagging from a wire.
Then she says,
give me your bandana boss so I
can cover up
these scabs
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GABRIEL PALACIOS
Gabriel Palacios is a poet and songwriter from Tucson, Arizona, and the author of the collections A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign (Fonograf Editions, 2024) and Lunar Hilton Elegy (University of Iowa Press/Kuhl House Poets, forthcoming 2026). A lyric diorama of the “vacant present” and its half-remembered dream of soft, popular luxury, Lunar Hilton Elegy traces the afterlives of abandoned futures through dead malls, night court proceedings streamed on YouTube, the 1990 debut issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine. His neo-noir musical project, Spanish Trail Motel, expands these scenes into atmospheres, interludes and synth-accompanied torch-song.
To download a printable PDF version of this page, click here.
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A Dozen Nothing 