Inverted Excerpt

Christopher Rey Pérez

26.02.16

16-2
please everyone, i am following this thread close and the poetry beautiful but i have a similar experience to share and if you can help me i will appreciate it, i am from the south and will not say what town because i have to protect my girls but it is in the north where el chapo wants power, i am a police there and i know what is the situation with the drugs and immigrants from america central and i always tried to take care of myself humbly and my family but sometimes everything you do to live and be safe and make the good life does not matter in the end of it. it does not always matter in the end of it and it was weeks ago when i was to do my tour of the city and of a sudden a black SUV with four mask men who jumped out sticked a black bag over my head and push me into the SUV, it was all of a sudden, i was in the SUV and going somewhere, i do not know how long the driving was and was just thinking about my daughters at the moment and yes, about my life to. why me, i wondered, as i said, i am a police and takings happen every day but i am humble and honest, so why me i was asking until the SUV stopped then and they take me out and even if i was still wearing the black bag i can smell the air passed it and realized we were in the mountains not that far away from my town. a rifle was pushing me pointed in the back and sits me in a chair where they tie me up take the bag off and in front i see three corpses on the floor naked with their heads knifed off. they were all mexicans, one of them with tattoos one of them with almost no hairs and short and indian and one of them a woman. i was looking worried and started breathing with sounds and the leader kicked me, he knocked me down in the chair i was tied up to and said, pinche maricón, that is spanich for faggot, how you to orinate on your self if we not doing anything to you still. we are treating you good, pinche marrano, and that is spanich for pig. but i was not hearing any of this because there was the head of the closest body one meter from my face on the ground without blood and everything smelled like cloro like they cleaned up the blood without the bodies and then put the bodies back for me and that made me have fear when seeing them with the smell of cloro getting me sick, it was too much, my vision was blurry and inside in the middle of the neck of the head was something silver, it was like a shining bone. if i died today they are going to see my silver thing too? i said to myself. or instead, do they know about it? and is this silver thing speaking for me? is this the thing that lets us mexicans to cry? i emptied all my thoughts into the shining bone, i was without no family anymore, no more of my girls, my parents, i was just breath disappearing as the leader stepped on my head. vete a la chingada, he said, that is spanich for go to hell, and he called my name too but my nickname my compatriots call me and that was more than strange and i will not say what my nickname is. the whole thing was more than strange. the other men closed on me and knifed the ropes from my wrists and ankles to let me free. they said they were going to leave the room and that i have to take off my clothes all of it and run home without looking back and that if i look back they will shoot me and go home and shoot my daughters because the police are pigs and the police are not on the side of the people and the police are extreme cowards and that is why i was going to run away without looking back because i was a pig and a coward. then they kick me in the stomach, they step on my fingers, they slap my face. then they orinate on me, they squash on my throat, they shoot the gun next to my head. then they leave and i take off my clothes shaking with the difficult kinds of hurt in the brain and the body and was going to leave but i look back at the silver bone shining, it is shining so bright and small like a piece of silver from taxco and i say i am going to take it. i put my hand in the neck of the knifed head, i remember it was the head of the indian because it was like one. maybe it was huichol or yaqui, i do not know, the silver bone was attracting to me, the flesh was tough in the neck when i sticked my fingers in until i grabbed the silver bone with all my fingers and ripped hard with two hands, one to hold the head in place and the other to pull and ask if they will see it so i put it in my mouth and run and leave the ranch and the mountains. i was running from my soul. i was terrified. i am running for hours under pure desert and night wind and nothing until my feet begin to bleed and i do not stop until my body collapses far from the ranch but still away from town and thirsty. i see a cactus then that was the drinking kind and when i was to drink from it i realized at that moment that i was gasping, the silver bone disappeared or i eated it! then i think maybe it falled out of my mouth when running. then everything black and when i wake up and it was early morning i start walking back to follow my steps and find where i dropped the silver bone but i said what if they see me and kill me like they promised? and maybe it was not lost but inside me like i first thinking. i turn around then and go home.
since then, i dream weird. i dream the land is full of aliens and rotting. i try to spend all my time with my daughters. we stay at home and watch cartoons or la selección. and on other days we do puzzles or play the lottery. one day i bring home a dog. when i work, i park my car at the supermarket and wait until i finish my time working around the early evening. i read in inglish. when the words do not make any sense anymore and get tired and turn into spanich i practice porchuguess, i play a game where i am interviewing a beautiful brazil woman who is morena like me and tall with a shining smile. then the game gets me tired and the beautiful woman is speaking spanich not porchuguess and she looks like the girls who leave the chedraui in the hot sun that are sweating down their necks tiny pearls so i say out loud all the words in italien i know like amore, bambini, birra, cane, costo, culo, dolce, dotorre, labbra, libro, ragazza, salvare, and other words and i say them in alphabetical order but eventually i am speaking spanich again, i am always returned to it because the langouges are all very same when romantic and it is still the morning. i do not arrest anyone. i think about the silver bone then and these questions are the ones i write down:

1. ¿why am i a police and will there be a time i have to kill?

2. ¿i really thought i was to die that day or only pretended?

3. ¿if a narco will kill me why god does not kill me first?

4. ¿does god or the angels have to do with that silver bone?

5. ¿was it an adams apple? ¿do women have, it also?

6. ¿is the silver bone tied with sin?

7. ¿is it a secret a message a blessing or a joke?

8. ¿am i a coward like they say?

9. ¿will they come for isabella and montserrat?

10. ¿was it the same voice of my colleague the man that kidnapped me?

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Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. This excerpt is from a simulated forum that sets up a personal curriculum of angelology in preparation for a forensic investigation of a series of crimes. Part of his forthcoming book, gauguin’s notebook (&Now Books) that’s slated for a Fall 2016 release, this forum begins to write through Gauguin’s Tahitian journal that chronicles an intense period of artistic, amorous, and fundamentally colonialist production for the painter. You can read the pages that precede this excerpt here.

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