The decade the country became known throughout the world

By William Archila
The ground cracked
like the rough pit of a peach
and snapped in two.
The sun behind the mountains
turned into an olive-green glow.
 
To niña Gloria this was home.
She continued to sell her bowl of lemons,
rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ
pocketed in her apron. Others
like Lito and Marvin played
soldiers in the ruins of a school,
running around mounds of bricks,
          shooting chickens and pigs.
 
No one knows exactly how
a light film of ash appeared
on everyone’s eyelids
          early in the morning
or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky,
twitched, leaped through the streets.
 
Some say the skin of trees
felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow.
Others believe the soapsuds
washed aside in rivers
began to rise in their milk.
 
One Monday morning, a rain fell
and the cemetery washed into the city.
Bones began to knock
              and knock at our doors.
Streets became muddy rivers
waiting for bodies to drop
              among piles of dead fish.
 
In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave.
 
This explains why women thought
and moved like lizards under stones,
why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls,
why dogs lost their sense of smell
sniffing piles of rubble to get back home.
 
In a few years, no one cared
about turtles banging their heads against rocks,
bulls with their sad, busted eyes,
parrots that kept diving into creeks,
the dark swelling of the open ground
              or at night a knife
              stained the kitchen cloth.
 
Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground,
the broom licking her feet at each stroke.
 
At the bus station, Marvin shined
military boots,
              twenty-five cents a pair,
reduced his words to a spit, a splutter
of broken sentences
             on shoe polish, leather.
 
In the evenings, he counted coins
he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home,
one step closer to the cracked bone
clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.

Copyright Credit: William Archila, "The decade the country became known throughout the world" from The Art of Exile.  Copyright © 2009 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.  Reprinted by permission of Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.