GABRIEL DOZAL
In-Laws Fill the Mountain Caves
The border is phrase-shifting its way through the border.
The word culpable is a true friend in a detainment center.
I’m just a jailer of maps. I keep the maps so they won’t keep me.
Do you want your map to match reality?
I have a mattress; I need room.
I can’t write a better border than the one that’s already here.
#
He doesn't know where to look for papers.
He’s not sure where to find the room.
#
The border creep is a concept because the border keeps growing,
keeps creeping toward the saddle.
It wants to ride the glitch
of the platform. Is that all the crossers have? A platform
to stand on as they cross over this bridge and onto another bridge.
%
I put the crossers into my mural because I want to keep their faces.
I’m a face collector and I have five faces in my collection.
The Border Fence is a Block Chain
When a future wants to know
what’s in this word?
Can we go inside it ? Oh, it’s so roomy in in this word, I think
I’ll just live here, inside your word.
How did you get here?
Nobody’s supposed to be here
but also no bodies.
You are your word and I am inside it.
The same words that migrated with you.
The Crosser’s are Plural
B
e
cause there’s
a
a
a s
a s
n s
n
o t h er o n e t t
ne right
behind him, in line y
o
u
d o n ‘ t
w
w
ww ant to match
your map to reality?
You should. It’s fun.
The border is u
u
u
u
Pp w ww www ww ww w w
stream from reality w
in the ssssssss h e r e
h
adow Of Texas large
boll l l ll ards
create dolllllllllll l I I ars the paper that never lives,
I’m sorry, lies
M mm mm
o
U
N t ain , you’ve always been a text-sh ad ow
chasing your bodie’s bb odie’s shado w
The Crosser Can Only Refer to the Crosser
The users don’t know they are the users
they’re the content. Like how the king of the high C’s
always stars in Le Fille De Regemont.
Mattresses belong in rooms where
crossers re-sing their dues.
In the candid story the story
was mumbled back to me.
I whistled until I couldn’t fit my voice back
into my voice.
Call the border by what you’ve always called it
but call it: got lost in the Arizona room.
The border talks and talks all day in the kiosk.
Rendering the face is similar to rendering the fat
Afterwards, your face is more tender,
a little zen garden, a place for citizens like Muggsy Bogues.
Everyone changed into customs, a gulf within a gulf.
This is fence-free Monday,
No fences, every Monday.
But unfortunately I’m a Friday body,
where several hands are shed
of their identifying
papers, they just fly away along with your hands.
Primitivo, the landscape has become you.
We connected the dots and your face has appeared on the map.
Primitivo you have become the landscape.
Your acne scars are telling us so much about your ancestors.
We’re giving faith a fast leash, a tug on the rope.
Us customs love the goings of people
and crossers like the returning.
The crosser is polished for a while within but unpolished on the outside.
But the inside in unpolishable
It can’t be polished because it’s a room the crosser can’t find.
The crosser is superimposed on herself.
Customs cannot be superimposed on customs.
This is what it means to be a crosser:
You must be able to superimpose yourself on yourself.
If the crosser can be superimposed over another crosser
they count only as one, instead of two.
We were instructed to open the room
that is easiest to access in our mind’s eye.
My mind’s eye sees people who can’t talk to themselves. The recursive tattoo
on the mind that I thought everyone had.
They need a customs agent to talk to.
Call me by my game and it’s border ball.
The answer to speech is another speech on top of that speech. Can you see all the speeches
THROUGH the other speeches? I can see your speech behind the speech about Diebenkorn,
I mean, debunking, the government’s narrative of art.
struck / mirrors / border / / / / / go / / / / / Mexico / one / closures / /
Mirrors struck the border and the border shown back the light.
You look into the bollards and see a segmented version of your face.
It’s all memorials now, in the passive
voice that’s the voice
the crossers use in hopes of passing.
We can’t know ourselves more
than a mirror knows the border.
The border simulator is constant rehearsal for the rehearsal of the mural.
I put the crossers into my mural because I need the how-to manual,
The one about how to read a crosser’s face.
It didn’t come with this crosser.
History of Primitivo’s Body
%Always out of a balance
Behind, leaves are smugglers
the trash of cow years “their eyes hurt” says Primitivo
His duplicate passport aches his fountain.
After being denied entry, the wells scattered Primitivo
to ranch through passing people.
Our relationship now strained despite Misses
dropping the level up artifact.
But one must have one plus
when some are more yeah guns. Either way, mods class their shields
before crossing the checkpoint. Primtivo rides
with the new empress of have-I- been-there?
She tells him: The border must leap out of you,
imitate night driving at high speeds
with no lights. I before chests.
A portal only comes as rare as it’s pretty.
This portal is like a hermit's insidiously edgy spotlight novel.
This is parody road, the border use to lead here and be slow in the slowing.
“What is this erotic neon car?” Said the customs agent,
No, no, no, it was erratic.
The crosser is the rock and the car is the glacier.
Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, TX and received his MFA in poetry from The University of Arizona. His work appears in: The Iowa Review, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, The Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, The Volta, and forthcoming from A Dozen Nothing.