Los Zetas.

Don Manuel is chopping wood outside, loud as all hell,
The baby is crying and the girl fusses over him,
Doňa Nita cooking the eggs for dinner with hot oil popping,
Omar changing the fertilizer from one sack to another, preparing for tomorrow,
It’s late, like 8:00, the news just coming on,
I lean closer to the fuzzy TV to hear more, exasperated, almost falling off my chair. Armida laughs at me. Then:

72 immigrants discovered dead in northern Mexico.
Everything stops.

We remember the boy who lived here, the son who went at 19 years old, his money sowed tightly into his shoe.

Doňa Nita prays usually every night before bed.
She kneels on the dirt floor and whispers and asks God for things and guidance and peace
But tonight she just cries, just cries, her large body shaking in the silence of the house.

Of course, none of this will make the news in the United States of America.

Especial

Hey, so check this out, last night I’m taking the last bus, the Especial, home from San Salvador, the clouds high, big beautiful sunset on the drive, little later lightning dancing nonsense across the sky, lighting up those clouds, making them turn blue all crazy and then fade instantly to black. And I got lonely; you know that tight pain in my chest, a lack of feeling ever really there with someone—make sense, as I had just passed the afternoon faking to be confused about being in love with Lore. But I just shut it down, went over to my friend’s place after getting off the bus, knew better than to be alone—after all, with four years of being single I have learned something—and bought a dollar’s worth of pupusas and a beer on the corner, turned on the TV, shutting off those stupid voices.

Earlier the same day I bought two shirts, a camera, shoes, and other things. I bought shoes without trying them on, bought the shirts, all this shit!, for like $200 and didn’t even think twice about it. Just do it, Tim, I said. Stop thinking. Trust your instincts.

When I saw Lore again that afternoon, man, I knew right away nothing would’ve ever worked, ever. Just no attraction. I need to trust my instincts more—the shoes are great, but the pain I felt on that damn Especial seems to come with trying to fake it. Like, she trying to hold my hand as we walking and me just being distracted by every little thing so as not to let her see my eyes.

But yeah, so I get off the bus and everyone is hurrying to get home and out of the rain, scrambling behind doors and into alleys, and I’m like the only single living person on the streets of Chalchuapa, and those big-ass volcanoes looming out in the distance, all sad and shit, there for no good reason, just humps of rocks now, and here I am realizing I’m more alone than ever.

Hey, just buy the camera. I did. Hey, $115, fork it over. Shoes. All of it. Just now. Instincts. Wake up, man.

Night Sky

Night sky:

I watched those planes from a dusty Salvadoran village, red lights blinking across the sky
Today I come back on one,
Cutting the night, and my mind, open.
Open. It is like breaking off chunks of ripe watermelon with your hands.

Memories:

Of lust and a lust for love and
Of me with women, quite beautiful, never understood, dancing into the darkness.
Black hair and hips, smiles and salsa music, the smell of corn and earth and green
And loneliness like smoke curling around me, silence.

The plane hurls on home.