The missionaries walked with blisters on their skin. Traveling the maze-like belly of the finca. They took a sliver of the scythe to the bowels of the fields and exhumed its sugary cane. We were what was left. Next was grasping names from the villagers. A river that remembers each pair of passing feet plunged into its waters. Like a key with its cut filling the body of space. Some mistake prophecy for dreams where memory hangs like a ghost cashing food stamps; spending space money on what we all desire and then taxing the earth or blaming our friend for living and/or not doing so. A mass at an allotted time with god running marathons through a portal of a penumbra the size of a television screen. A conversation with amnesia on the navel of ash and dust, the thought of leaving familiar to longing. We saw the last days on neon orange steppes and the codex was written in indecipherable lines of the palm. There were the days passing like flocks of birds, messengers circling in tangents never quite coming to the pith of things. Someone thought you strange to wander in a land such as this working for your livelihood until the flesh unhooked from the bone. I saw how you were always peering into your vanity mirror as though it had scrying properties, hidden things were a mass of fleshy pulp as though Turkish novelas had some secrets to bestow. Sometimes the unnameable things can’t be translated. In the green fields of passing time there was a silence that overtook the house and there like many times over my family walked as though spirits. Words within a thousand scripture within an alcove of years pondered the dark of an apagón. The way la fe had come and led us through family bloodline after bloodline. Se fue la luz they would say and off went the lights in el campo. We didn’t see the hand trying to turn a page and give up. Moving from spirit world was as if a dreamlike travel to Colombia. As though we were bodies of Oracle-bloodline. The last breath of the dying let out Morse code to strange gods. And we let out wild wails like the veiled cry of Mary at the cross. Those last few minutes ran the parameter of the eternal, and someone shut their eyes as though truth needed blindness.

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Harry Edgar Palacio (He/Him) is a Dominican-Colombian writer, visual artist, and lo-fi musician. He has been accepted to be published in Rigorous, Tule Review, Coffin Bell, Landlocked Magazine and elsewhere. His chapbook and debut book were both released by (Finishing Line Press): Ambrosia (2019) and Sutras of Tiny Jazz (2021). He obtained an MEd from Manhattanville College.  Harry worked as an assistant director of a social justice center, as a yoga teacher and as an art teacher in the Dominican Republic. He is a BIPOC music journalist living with schizoaffective disorder.