Politica

A body washed ashore that summer,

bullet-riddled in fatigues. 

We gathered around, five cousins,

bold and bored from days at the beach.

Anibal Jose joked that fish made 

dinner of his eyes.

Two strangers nodded and Anibal Jose vomited.

Colombia, when I miss you,

I try to think of days like this: when guerilla death 

tolls tell better stories than grandmothers.

Days like sand, children, and a blind man

petrified in his prayer.

Days like my passport: blue, godhead, imperial--

pretenses of immunity and power 

ready to be stripped by a soldier, 

a boy who knows accents do not identify

corpses like blood. A boy whose gun

escorts my mother, date for interrogation,

the last step before flight.

She’ll board with me, free of her homeland,

always afraid of turning to salt.

But televised outcries never cease, Colombia,

and your memory is buried beneath 

a newsman’s coifed veneer

again.

Fish eat our eyes, yet we continue

raising our weapons with an anger we were taught.

Our corpses will wash ashore 

again and again

to the eyes of children, 

sun-caked and sickened.