TX (six postcards)

Z. Schwartz

On the way to Texas, I regret to inform you
that I am still myself. Though I have lost
the mandate of heaven, I've spotted eight 
cherubs in the dry brush, they lurk 
relentless in the undergrowth, peering up at you 
with their cretinous, blank gazes. You look
to the west and suppose it has a certain charm. 

Big. 
Dead. 

The governor’s a eunuch though he claims 
eight dependents on his taxes, one for each county 
with more Spanish moss than sense. Good news:
God is love. The man beside me is a grant writer, 
& lucky this because that’s the only job there is. 
He wants to play me a song he wrote. But when he asks 
the bus driver if the speaker has bluetooth, 
“I don’t know,” is the reply, “I can’t see its mouth.”

The caddy corner boy draws turkeys with his hand, 
outlining, adding a beak. Fifty turkeys from one hand. 
We stop at a vestibule of toilets and vending machines 
that people used to name and call a town. Here 
I call my brother to remind him I am coming 
and can he pick me up. “What,” he says, “do you think 
I’ve been dreading all week.” I know he’s kidding, 

and I tell him I know he’s kidding, still polishing 
the hook even as it rests within the fish’s mouth. 
I draw up an outline as to how we’ll arrange the beds, 
a clothing rack down the middle for privacy. 
On the shitter wall some literate deviant’s written
a fact that remains unobtrusive and eternal,
“If you lived in hell, you’d be home by now.” 

We follow the setting sun too cautiously, losing it 
somewhere along the horizon. Not ten minutes 
after exiting the pit, the driver pulls over again, 
proclaiming, “I am not a robot,” and marches out 
onto the shoulder for a piss. Nobody laughs—
then I do, too much. Pretty green in San Antonio,
looks like it could be just about anywhere. 

Sometimes the clouds pivot unnaturally. God fell
down once and simply no one picked him up. 
When they take down the tray table to sleep it feels 
as though someone’s extracted a part of your spine 
under local anesthetic. The vultures clean, are paid
in death. Either they don’t get a break for lunch 
or the whole day is one. So much in this world 
rots in plenty, does grow on trees. Not here.

Z. Schwartz has work published or forthcoming from Sugar House Review, Scaffold, Protean, Robert, Canvas, and Ghost City Press. He is the editor of the website Plainly & Painfully.