Regional Security Meeting

REGIONAL SECURITY MEETING

We are at our quarterly security meeting
Talking about how El Salvador is fucked with
Gangs and extorsions and a people so scared that every time I go to pueblo to buy tomatoes they tell me to be careful.

And we are in a nice gated-community beside a pool and then a young girl, 13, 14, climbs out
Wet, her hair and the backs of her legs and her whole body glistening.

Suddenly I am in Lawrence, Kansas again in the community pool with lots of pretty girls in the middle of August, text messages and cheap perfume and ice cream.

Or in Michigan at 7th grade swim team practice, scared and scrawny at 5:30 in the morning, a breakfast of instant oatmeal and OJ.

Or in California with my dad tired and nostalgic

Or in Washington cold and drunk off of plastic bladders of wine, huddling around a campfire with my buddy George.

Now, days later, my twisted mind runs circles. I can´t think of anything besides that girl, the backs of her knees, her bare feet, and how grateful I am for her. Fuck these gangs, hit men. I just need a pool to feel safe, happy, warm. To feel. The goal is to feel again, to feel something besides fear, to get these druggies and crooks off my back. Let them slide. I am wet with the water already.

Pregnant

PREGNANT

She sings softly, a stupid pop song
Thinking I´m not here.
She is pregnant. The girlfriend of my host brother, age 17, is pregnant.
She has moved in, become pregnant, and now sings stupid songs outside my room.
I wonder. Because here the rule is,
Don´t talk about it,
We just conform and accept,
Because there is nothing to say
But I am slightly angered by this,
Their so-typical decision to have a child young
Or maybe it was an accident? Lack of planning?

Maybe it is one more hard piece of evidence that life here presents few options and many, with that in mind, see no reason to study, work, or strive for anything. So she will have a baby, a screaming, crying baby who will do these things right next to me. Because?

There is nothing else left to do. That´s the reality, Tim. NO. It´s part of it, but not it.
Can we at least fucking talk about this? When did I vote? When did I get something to say? Why can´t we just say this is a bad idea, just for evidence, just to know and say so?

Silk

SILK

Walking to the church service held outside close to my home.
Singing, clapping, it is dark already and the village women have already made
Their little fires in a circle
Selling yuca, pupusas, pasteles, and the smoke from these fires
Drifts up up up above to the wide gigantic conacaste tree
Expanding into the branches, reaching
Blurring the line between here and there,
Aquí y allá, planet and void, space and heaven, and
I feel as if I am walking on a strong thin line of silk, a poem
Connecting all I know and am and am not and don´t and will.

Remesa

REMESAS

We will, with the help of the Money her son sends us from New Mexico, put a new roof on our house. Metal instead of wood, plastic instead of clay, no more tile. We will use duralita, a corrugated material which is $1.75 the square meter. No cracks, no seperate parts. Tile has been around for hundreds of years, the only roof we have known, besides grass. Now our son who has a girlfriend and a job and who will probably never come back it seems like, well, we will put on a new roof.

The first thing we did was buy a TV. Then a sound system. Then we put three more rooms on the house, one where I sleep, the other, where four others sleep, soon to be five because his brother´s girlfriend is pregnant. Can we talk about this please???

The roof will be nice. No more raindrops or wood or replacing tile. It will be nice. Thanks to her lost son, this ghost, this son of phone calls and 9-digit bank codes and street addresses and towns we don´t remember or bother to know anymore. We lost track. Thanks to him. Metal instead of wood, plastic instead of clay, reminders he´s there to stay.