A Tally of Ghosts: On Gabriel Palacios’ “A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth I Sign”

Gabriel Palacios | A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth I Sign | Fonograf Editions | March 2024 | 104 Pages

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Owing largely to a distinctive bimodal annual rainfall pattern, the Sonoran Desert is the wettest and most ecologically heterogenous desert in North America, if not on earth. Indeed, if one has negotiated any stretch of its rugged and approximately 100,000 square mile igneous and metamorphic stage—which spans as far as lower Baja up to Southern California—they’ve likely noted a rich, concentrated drama of cohabitation between unlike forms of growth. 

Many would also say that it’s really once you hit central Arizona and cut south a while (for the cartographically curious, think the 19 off of the 10, heading toward the border town of Nogales) that you begin to sink into the heart of this desert’s famed biodiversity. Steer around here and odds are you’ll come across a water-dependent copse of cattails, immersed in a silty saline morass, brushing up alongside the drought-resistant duo of pipe cactus and prickly pear—hardly something you’d see in the Chihuahua, Mojave, or Great Basin.

You’d also be steering around the territory formerly known as Pimería Alta—the backdrop of Gabriel Palacios’ new collection, A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth I Sign. 

It would be disingenuous to suggest Palacios’ debut—out now thanks to the radical minds behind the record label/press hybrid Fonograf Editions—is anywhere near as preoccupied with the region’s unalloyed wealth of endemic flora and fauna as the above paragraph. Rather, whereas one may still be lucky enough to find in a given Sonora-scape the delicate harmony of coexistence between various forms of life, the kind of Cambrian Explosion that Palacios describes has spilled motor spirit, sprayed gravel, erected chainlink, excavated tarpits, scattered cig butts everywhere, stacked teetering cinder blocks for pre-painted El Caminos to rest upon like giant ersatz Gilas, evolved interstates-that-pass-along-derelict-motels like arteries, muted the buzz of a bee with the buzz of an AC or radio static, given the world a tintype patina, replacing the sun’s salutations with stadium lights and sodium lights and Sizzler signs, and the moon’s with high beams and neon arrows and TV glow. Here, of the more collective and biotic rapports that used to be, only petrol-formed ghosts and sundries remain. 

Even so, while A Ten Peso partly charts the capital-thirsty encroachment that has for centuries and continues to disfigure and barren-ize the Sonora’s biosphere, through its four punchy and forcefully elliptical sections, the book finds as much concern in reckoning with the inherited and inheritable half-lives of humanity’s monumental lineage of disharmony with itself. In other words, if contemporary Sonoran biodiversity is determined by the appearance of, say, a reedy marsh plant tangling with a desert succulent, what then of a native headdress counterposed against a conquistador’s helmet, a presidio plundering a previously unperturbed copper deposit, cries of allegiance to foreign comptrollers drowning out cries of sorrow for yet another stillborn, a church dead-ending a “matrilineal road.”  

At once an archeologist, hauntologist, and student of the oral tradition, Palacios’ lyrics carefully excavate, document, and interpellate through such questions, interrogating what a peopled coexistence could possibly mean when, amidst modern exigencies, to coexist peopled is to exist atop megatons of sociohistorical sediment rendered and tamped down from decisions-turned-outcomes made by groups fueled forward under the sway of pathological and poisonous persuasions about their own superiority.

For reference, the Pimería Alta—now part of what is, among other locations, the author’s birthplace and hometown of Tucson, AZ—was a terrain occupied by 17th- and 18th-century Spain. Before that, it was (and still is) the terra firma of an array of indigenous groups, including the Pima, after whom Spanish Jesuits gave the region its latin name, which translates to “Land of the Upper Pima.” Of course, no incursion of this kind would be complete, let alone completable, without a gratuitous dose of stone-hearted violence. Indeed, barbarity is the lifeblood of every colonial project’s ultimate aim—the establishment and maintenance of inhuman and siphonic markets under the perverted aegis of eternal economic growth. And, as is at this book’s center of gravity, such barbarity induces a lasting inbetweenness, an ichorous substance that hounds like a revenant, announcing its holographic presence through hylic and psychic, inner and intersubjective forms, now generations out, quite beyond the grasp of language’s categorizing bent: “The alms you finessed / Into my coat were they / Transponders?”

But, like any poet deftly tuned to what poetry can (and cannot) do and has (and has not) done, Palacios’ words don’t grasp so much as gesture. Often, they listen more than they speak, ponder more than purport. Acknowledge without relying on compression of possibility. Resolution is not what they’re after. After all, how can one reduce into comprehensible calculability the trespassings and horrors committed by (and/or against) one’s own ancestors? 

To be sure, far too many of us—poets and politicians alike—try to logically organize away the experience of being related, near or far, to colonizer bloodlines. Usually, it’s through some knee-jerk cocktail of defensive amnesia, off-color displays of atonement (for a real barnburner of an example, think Nancy Pelosi and co. wearing Kente), and other self-lobotomizing mental acrobatics. Palacios, thankfully, gives those of us who need it (and there are many) an alternative; a flexibility brought to bear in his ability to world-build tentatively, fill in the blanks, assay the scape, sift through the dregs, scrape away the chipping paint, capture sound bites, marvel skeptically at the endless stream of “white weird apocrypha,” remain longer than most in the gone-to-seed lobbies of one’s own spectral complicities and put-ons, all in order to truly sense the ways that they may be transmitted down and down and down—that tradition is past, present, and future melted as one and wielded, tenuously, by all:

I understand that city grid now

I reaped its energies, chipped in

On night jaw wirings by the assent 

My bleacher seat contributes to a ballpark cheer 

Now I’m walking normal amid syncopated, sunny public music, I 

   can’t answer

If I think I hear that name

Diminished in the magnifying glass angled by the child

Who accepts she must become monstrous,

The power of a paid, commissioned prayer

Under blacklight

Palacios’ technique alone affirms the slipperiness of, and tensions inherent in, undertaking this kind of endeavor. “The Almanac of Free Things” begins “The final sound of sun touching grid / is monophonic Leonard’s / Hallelujah chorused by its star roster of misinterpreters” The musical and syntactical densities and dialectics here, at once jagged and slick, hanging and pinioned, consonant and assonant, serve to buoy the uncanny assuredness that their contents can’t remain unquestioned but could remain without a tidy answer. This particular poem finishes with a breakneck sonic sprint:

I hear my government

name chirped from the loudspeaker

rigged to that incandescent lamentation of liquidation warehousing

I don’t dare stop scrolling

churches, churches up

a matrilineal road 

in microfiche dark

mutoscope wound slow

a widow’s burying her servant’s child passing

checks against a suspect future date

In their percussive cascading, mouthfuls like these—which readily populate the pages throughout the text—leave the reader with mouthfeels which themselves often mimic the soft starts and hard stops, the abbreviations and expansions, the overlaps and overwhelmings, the cutoffs and crowdings and incongruities that comprise the sonor(a)ous wilds of even one human’s condition as conditioned all too often by inhuman wilds. As if vines—at times in shape and, in others, speed—Palacio’s sonic blooms loom, in moments, with the threat of choking and overwhelming. But breathing space is never lost. Hairpin enjambment meters the pace and gives air. The poems suggest knowing where they are taking us by how they are doing it, all while not always knowing where they are coming from—a being through being disoriented. And, as they suggest and assure, too, of such a molten state: “We all do that.”

If I had to do what most artists loathe seeing done to their work and pigeonhole this book with a single descriptor, I might call it a census of the phantasmal. Whatever it took to write, one can imagine Palacios, with every (extra)sensory apparatus available to him, having scoured every inch of his home turf—from its impound lots to its public gardens, its strip malls to its riparian remnants—for resident spirits and wraiths and wights. My bias on full blast here, I wager there’s hardly a technology-of-thresholds better suited for such eerie purposes than poetry, its architecture uniquely and continually capable of renegotiating its own intimacies and limitations when faced with life’s elemental mirages and energetic artifacts. And it seems Palacios would agree. Even this act of endeavoring to undertake a census isn’t entirely beyond precarity:

Whether your Independence Day

Or New Year’s Eve misfirings 

Laid Egg-sacs 

In a living

Host

Must it be

Adjudicated now? 

There’s an ever-present nosiness to be with and within—without brusquely defining—the braided elegy of voices and plangent presences, the “dumb/crossbones of napping limbs/we make,” that populate a landscape rent by sorrows and borders, disfigured by brutal imperial arithmetics of loss and gain. Unlike much of the historical accounts and acts they are concerned with, the poems here adopt an expansive, rather than restrictive, positionality. And much like the ecological environs they are bounded by, they showcase a writer who’s Umwelt, whether through practice or precocity, is especially tuned towards liminal and coexistent modes of being, having, and doing. More than many, Palacios is capable of catching the glitch which reveals the dark data of a world that one has a moral imperative to rebuff. Now, what exactly can one do with the data? Among whatever else, he wryly suggests:

Let us sing into the USA Pawn and Jewelry of our lord,

heads down at the pipe organ emoting just a whistle

of sand, this scant crosswalk noise,

this new contract written over that of the pawn ticket,

the residuum of my inheritance, the net worth of any psalm tied up

in the right of way

at this intersection,

washed in sagging sun and misremembered

Sonora-like, this stunning debut surfaces from and as a snarl of contrastive forms of growth. Then, human-like, and with a healthy dose of self-awareness, it wagers to survey that very terrain. What’s mapped, even at the risk of being misremembered, is at once opaque and crystalline, and nothing short of masterful.