Full Foreground

If Even Such Miracles Are Rare

6 If Even Such Miracles Are Rare 1 At the place come to a head by the assassins when images by way of sound as in the beating below us, one floor down, maybe two, her voice through some divide neither one of us can locate, over and over again her shrill petition, and then a rumble of a body thud, then still and begging such that all be rendered now of no account, even less so the police, the windows swung open to identify her whereabouts, why now among the neighbors? To this a mother’s caterwaul between siblings foaming at the mouth and panting with the punches or so the predators, when to silence when to speak as though an animal were a benevolence and grace no longer blurred between defiance and threat, between money and emotions, between diplomacy and outburst, between gift and verdict. 7 2 A year before the insurrection, I was terrified in my dream because of all the resentful people, behind me, beside me. They want me to get sick. The lower branches missing, and every spark of the pines flared over the roadside by the sun over the highland sierras and down the valley outside Comitán. That dream, the one of promised things, no work, no say, no belonging, is just the envious people tormenting me. They want me to leave behind a weave of sickness. They are angry since I built my little house. 3 Nocturnal nakedness in the clump field is a clod of seedcake wrapped in oil paper, furrows drizzled with mother’s milk, autumn kernels in gold riffle over the earth to the last fistful of wheat we called the bride as if to honor the dead now wedded in a first blaze and middle surge that brought us here, bread risen from the pap of bone meal, humor and the powdered grain grown tall where our departed were lain to face skyward in time so that a downpour fell to soak the brittle valley and the trees lending shade beneath the ascending union of our forebears, as we are here now encircled drawing seed time ground made wealthy earth these harvest children wailing. ...