mud dug out of holes
where concrete constructions
soon poured in safe
strong-posts
little pink running shoes splattered in puddles
a fence wrapped around my yard
the gate high, the latch out of reach
my daughter said she thought
"…real hard. Why we have fence?"
later
the tv showed us The Magic Flute
ashes on the steps of the administration building
a bent sign "I hate CIA" discarded in the bushes
voices said "There is no justice here"
I read the Salvadoran Aide Memoire and I imagined
the Salvadoran dead flowed from Carolyn Forché's heart
out of her
eyes
onto
her
page
from her words
they tried to grab me
I drove
the highway did not change
José Napoleon Duarté redeclared his aim
Kim Jong-un aims his words like missiles
media hypodermics inject poison thoughts
a picture of bulldozers muddying graves,
in history books I suppose
the Holocaust Never Again
and again and again and again, never-ending again
someone else's two year old in a hole,
a doll, limbs unnatural angles, feet bare
Life Magazine
Viet Nam, Cambodia
Online
Afghanistan, Syria
Death unloads a magazine
into the crowded street
nightmares, not dreams, told of men,
in bamboo cages
buried in sand
in meter-square boxes
I could have made those boxes
with scrap lumber
fence wood piled up,
neat left overs
not quite a meter high
how hungry I am for left-overs
Forché wrote somewhere that she threw up
puked
at my distance
I did not puke
I heard Duarté say "Salvadoranian,"
it sounded like "subterranean"
in a past I do not know
and I hear all of the misprunciations
of my mind, slipping past to present to past
future simple complex tenses unwrapped
I saw a daughter in the ground
muddy feet askew no grave marker,
not fancy, not plain
Just the fence around my yard
its six-foot gate
No two-year old hand
should reach that latch to get out
or to get into this world…
I woke up.
I remember that after
we watched, so many years ago,
my daughter ate yogurt
in the morning and asked,
"I see Magic Flute?"
©2017 Michael Dickel
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