Utah, reprised*

I swear I cough up alkaline soil with every street-illness I pick up and it’s been nearly ten years. No one likes my long sentences anymore. Paris Hilton’s accounts of sexual abuse and maltreatment in Utah spurred a dozen WhatsApp groups for residential treatment solatium scavengers. Lawsuits. No dollar amount mentioned in this thread, or that one. This one claims millions. This one’s copy-pasted suit documents from a Bath and Body Works trial. Carmen’s in all of them. I see her small photo every fifteen messages. There’s young girls, thirteen or fourteen years old. Some have just returned from Utah. The centers were bound to hold treatment notes for ten years upon intake. Where did they go? I’m driving in Twentynine Palms. Everything’s sore. Calloused. Nothing sounds right. I drink from a pressurized plastic water bottle. There should be horses here. The sun shifts and my fingers are warmed in my lap. I haven’t thought about her in a while. I published her poem in the book, she hated me for reasons neither of us held the ability to defervesce. It’s all there. There was spat of windshield time it’d remediate, and I sat in the corner of a dark and unfamiliar condominium kitchen with my toes curled over fingers, I sat and I decided on reconstitution. I’m sorry. It’s flat everywhere. It’s Utah gutted. It’s not worse. Kirsten drives from New York to Cedar City. She flicks her focus through the rodeo, she splays her hands to a nail technician, she records from her inner sleeve, she watches, she listens. There’s bodies moving on the ranch. I can’t watch. The dog, Copper, is dead. Here are the horses. The tallest excommunicated to Denver’s suburbs, the stallion. I’ve seen him. He’s gained good weight. He’s faster, now. There’s the lawn. I’ve never looked at anyone like that. My skin’s still where I left it. I don’t feel her anymore. I haven’t left. Does she know? My peace coils around my thumb and strangles the blood to splinters of taut skin. My peace in the stables, dancing in ten gallon buckets of bleach, burying chickens and taunting goats. Goatheads. Not a clear photo but spurred to the hem of her pants. The graves have been stripped. The goats bash at the unearthed little bodies. All the blood’s been dried already, it’s just wispy down, again and again, ramming their tiny bodies into those far tinier. The gravestone removal in peace, I see. Respect. Renewal. More bodies, living little bodies, the summer births far more successful than our own, welcome.

** Utah, reprised is a continuation of the 2016 piece of the same name. Above is an excerpted version of its revisitation.

Art;

Horses, Larry W. Schwarm

20th century

In collection, Arts of the Americas, Minneapolis Institute of Art

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/21275/horses-larry-w-schwarm