9 January 2008 | Vol. 7, No. 4

Mountain Lion Boy Testifies Before the House Subcommittee on the Atrocities of War

by HENRY OSO QUINTERO

Father Mother

This is absolute.

We have come as the New Buffalo soldiers

Only I am dressed in the Fawn of your love

Chirping the Deer in to win our own color in our own land

Father Mother

It is just as we moved out of the mountains

Into the Superstitions of the lights rising from below the valley

The sky red mud water and the moon the alligator's eye

The fire of the sun burns the handle of the saw so hot

Just like the summer burn and shake of the PS2 joystick

Burning on the bright burn of the talking box booming out

My rage with

No A/C

Father Mother

The animals of this land are beautiful and foreign

They run on two legs, carry small square teeth in the front like beaver and wild mules

Mamma

I so fucking own them

Papa the steel casings pass so quickly through them

Like red goose shit running to the sky as we pulled them from the reeds in fall

Back home

Papa it is like a feeding dream

At Abu Ghraib pregnant Cougars

Thick in their vulva from a late fall heat

And early cub turning under the soft ivory

Fur of her belly

It was if the prisons of Babylon

Were the snow caves of spruce

Way above Rocky Boy

And the boughs were filled with wood grouse

Their asses oiled slick and puckered with the abundance of nuts in their crop

All she had to do was beat them down

Holding a sun crystal between her lips

She was 24-hour sunshine and pile

Them up just like one of those old-time postcards along the 66

That showed piles of giant fish or foul

She has pictures of her victuals

Stacked processed naked six feet high

Mama

I love the Dexedrine

I love the Modafinil

It is just like the Holy Medicine of the Blue Deer

Except for the headaches and the shits

And the feeling that nits and Peojos crawl over you in premonitory warnings

That all leads back to the pad behind the nail tightening the trigger

Filling your mouth with the ghosts of sand

Papa

I kill all of their associates

Their dogs their bitches

Their sense of self

Daddy in all this speed and sulfur

I'm Happy and get good sleep in Sonata

Deep, without dreams of the road

Improvised as an enormous earthen Mouth

Exploding in a boom of fire eaters at the carnival settling to a vowel of smoke

Divinizing a dream in the dark of my belly

Open Intestines writhing like wet rattlesnakes fresh from birth

Father Mother

Mother Father

I may return to you

Draped in the colors that fly above

The great car dealerships of North America

And as the towers of blue halide cut through the night

Illuminating the cul-de-sacs of Itoy's maze

I will be the one who follows the joggers

Through the redwoods chirping like a bird

I will be that short human whistle

Before the family dogs vanish just past

The black at the end of the yard

Just before the deer are plucked from the library gardens

Rejoice my family

For I have risen

In the same way I will hold the throat

Until silence befalls all who have bought this life

In a box, and kept it

till our want bled out the sides.