Indian Country
Along the telegraph
lines at night Napoleon
goes gallivanting
under his breath This isn’t
the West for which I had hoped
Age of digital radios
come and gone and now
the emperor’s best men
have run off to the silver mines
(bitter roots in a little bath)
Live feeds track
those chilly blue eyes
as natives gather
by their monitors newest
on the Nebraska frontier
where the emperor plans
to make his famed
decision on the future
of touchscreen conquest
Look at his eyelids
twitch at the news
(same old) Two regulars
found entwined in a tent
French deck and front-loaders and each
of their brains burst open
Images of ocean blue
each alkali plain disappoints
Clickable maps already a joke
the sky crusts over as some
volunteer leans close (added later
in neat blue ink) Again
the enemy have stolen our horses
and left us these hoof prints in snow
Conquest
The sweat from Montezuma’s
long distance message runners sprinting post
to post in the night preserves itself
Tents of the world’s childhood rip apart
into too many people who don’t
like to listen Ferdinand Díaz Cortez
go on pooling their thoughts
era after era in the face of the 8-track
Goonies Wi-Fi cable
Spiritual matter meanwhile
feels something its membrane gives
slightly at the keeping of diaries
Valley of the Kings
They remember our number
those same lawyer-faced
babies as before
backstroking casually
along the celestial sphere
plucking out jewels
Harmless silo cluster
we are no longer
all those spirited
debates on the literalness
of the Eucharist
left off where again?
Faced with the art
of the fleeting obsession
jockish models
grinding celebrities
and imagining ourselves capable
of similar ascendencies
deaths as light and
as angelic I think I might
row back partway
and cry Fuck you
against this flaccid life
What do we do anyway
but dodge the occasional (albeit
slightly more lackluster)
beam flicked down upon us
in defunct annunciation?
Dumb grain town
lidding over adolescents
alongside the cerements
for guidance we will
say in the afterlife
Michael Homolka's first collection, Antiquity, won the 2015 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and is available from Sarabande Books. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Poetry Daily, among others. He currently teaches low-income high school students in New York City.