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144 From Los Angeles Looking South Orderly traffic, a normal day and 350,000 Salvadorians are in hiding in Los Angeles. Four women sit on the patio of El Rescate, dirt packed hard from use. Lydia’s the weaver of this story and two local women translate the Spanish, pull the threads straight for me. She has given this testimony for others besides me. She’s slight, simply dressed, a former philosophy student, a suspect. Her husband dead, her baby, living perhaps with an aunt under another name. Guernica again hangs before us in the air as the translators nod and check out the current slang or a new word from the war. The sun is full strength as I walk out onto Pico. I take Lydia’s testimony home, stand out on my deck and look south. Down the hill, the banana trees fan each other and two black dogs circle in a fenced yard. There are no people on the street and cars pass like flashes of sun through the pastel afternoon. 145 Not here, but somewhere else, an incident in a field or at a gate hatches the Guardia like flies. The interrogation team changes tactics to machine guns and disappearances. Not somewhere else, but here, the poem I am writing already wonders about its worth. I won’t be shot for what issues from the small house of my mouth in this country of the tomb of language. This poem will never need to lay a finger to the lips of the person writing it or head north wrapped inside a bundle of my clothes. ...

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