Poemas de Willy Palomo (El Salvador - EEUU) 5FIPAL

Willy Palomo 

Hijo de dos inmigrantes de El Salvador. Actualmente está trabajando en su maestría en poesía y maestría en Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe en la Universidad de Indiana, Estados Unidos. En 2017, recibió el Premio de Liderazgo Latino de la Ciudad de Bloomington por su trabajo al servicio de comunidades indocumentadas en Indiana. En 2016, fue nombrado Latin@ Scholar en la Conferencia de Poesía de Frost Place. Sus reseñas de libros y poesía han sido presentadas en Muzzle, PBS, Waxwing, The Wandering Song: Escritura centroamericana en los Estados Unidos, y más.

El Hombre Machete

Tía Tere told me his real name

was Daniel. Ojos como las boquitas

 mojadas de botellas cristales. Face,

a chilled Pilsner with a cracked side.

Daniel, una mano amputada, mitad

            de una oración callado en su puño.

Daniel, a bloody foot running nowhere

by itself. Daniel, who split Usulután

into myriad directions with the slash

of his machete: arm, leg, leg, arm, head,

 broken votive statues to a thirsty god.

                                    Whose horse hooves echo the gut-spill

smack of his blade. Who left police

with slippery limbs to gather and no

liquor to bury them. Daniel, better

known by locals as el hombre machete. 

¿What else do you call a motherfucker

            who hacks apart men, women, and children,

            for the nickel-and-dime of their pockets,

cabeza por cerveza and vice versa?

Everyone knows to run away from an indio

with a name that ugly—everyone except

for my Tía, of course.  ¡Don’t be a hero,

niña estúpida! cried abuelita in chorus

with all the other rational people.

Naw. While mamas seized their babies

and grown men ran and left their balls

at their tables, Niña Tere held her mesas

down, just a teenage campesina y cocinera,

a female David against midget Salvadoreño

Goliath, and she wasn’t ’bout to let some

crazy machete-wielding psycho-killer

chop her family into chicharrones. 

¿Do you know who I am? he asked her,

eyes squinting like a blade. Of course,

my Tía gave him a side-eye twice

 as sharp and spat ¡me vale

verga! She ain’t move, not even

as he declared, ¡Soy el Diablo!

and pulled out the gory machete,

face twisted with satanic laughter.   

Naw. Niña Tere laughed along cuz

she been already seen the devil

and he ain’t him. So he swung

his machete, a warning strike at the table

and got it stuck. My Tía didn’t hesitate.

Behind her back, she pulled a seething

red poker from the fire. Said she stabbed

ese carajo in the neck and he shrieked

like a butchered sow and fled, leaving

behind his machete, staggering back

to his horse, never to be heard of again.

Tía Tere tells me all this as I help her

prepare hojas de guineo for Christmas

tamales, my punishment for snapping

the limbs off my sister’s Barbie dolls.

Her hand a heavy smack across

my cheek as she sits, humming

softly to himnos, with legs not even

her diabetes could take from her.   

I ask her if she’s a murderer. Smiling

a crooked viejita smile, she tells me,

she would do it again to any man

who acts like he owns this world.

Blackout with Cows, an Interrogation, and a Murder

Four hours later and the cows’ tongues

are still purple, licking the baby’s face.

Or rather, what once was a face, the skull

now a bowl for a scavenger’s hunger.

A woman’s hair is a black tuft of grass.

She feeds the herd her liver from an outstretched

palm. Once, after watching older sisters

slaughter roosters at dawn, Mama wondered

what she would see if she pulled back

her own skin, what drumstick

they could make of her arm, what soup

from the song in her breasts.

And now, ten-years-old, she knows,

staring deep into the chaotic orchestra humming

inside this woman’s torso, the slow

moo of flies and bees as they feast, the slick

slaps of the tongues kissing the wounds,

as if bidding farewell to the dead.

                            *

Abuela told the police officers everything

she knew:

We were dropping by

to buy milk for cheese and quesadillas.

My daughter was the first to notice

the smell.

   

    We found don Ricardo

moaning in the barn. Los Gutierrez did it.

He didn’t give their sons jobs,

                                           so they slaughtered

his family,                   left him for dead

         two bullets in the chest.

                                             

                                             He told me

to tell Felipe. I told him Felipe was hungover.

No one else knows where in Chaletenango

to find my family, he said.

                             

                             Those were his final words. 

                            *

Maybe that was the reason I would blackout,

Mama tells me, her hammock

                                               swinging low

as a chariot. At her worst, she would lose

entire days

                 doing nothing, staring at what

she doesn’t remember. 

                                     I saw so much

during the war, mijo.      Jovencitas raped

while I hid up a tree.

                                  Men gutted while I hid

                                                       in the bushes.

But, of course, Mama didn’t begin to blackout

until decades later, after Papi cheated on her.

¿Isn’t it awful what griefs the soul chooses

to survive? There are griefs like packs of wolves

where your soul outruns your terror. The way

the war seemed to make Mama invincible.

Fuck a mountain. Her faith could move a border,

could scrub a white woman’s floor 

until she could bring her brother and sisters

with her.  There are griefs like snakes

around your ankles, your arms, your legs

until your hands confuse themselves

for snakeheads & leave everything

they grasp ill from their touch.

The way Papi’s philandering broke Mama

where the violence of war could not,

the way her grief would draw its purple tongue

over her face for hours until it erased

                               

her face.  There are torture survivors

who claim betrayal and heartbreak are worse

than what the army did to them.

And I still do not understand the artillery

in my tongue, how my lips can be a lawless

sergeant, how I ended up with an army of men

standing behind me, ready to justify

each love I betrayed with the sheer terror

of their presence, my confused heart

stupid with power. 

Witness

Papí punched holes on the top of the barrels,

so we could breathe but none to see, so I can’t

say I saw the battalion. I can’t say I saw the men,

¿or were they boys? tear a white flag from Papí’s

shirt & stomp his chest as if putting out a fire.

There was no fire, just Papí, grunting & swearing

there was no one left in our shack. No sons

to make soldiers. No daughters to make single

mothers. This is how Papí protected us.

He made us wear his jeans instead of faldas,

so if soldiers found us, we’d be harder to rape.

He beat us when we spoke back or said achís.

He taught us to cook sopitas y arrozes y tamalitos,

so one day, we could be good wives. The world

is unjust to unmarried women, he said. And thus,

we learned to suffer. Good daughters, we listened,

always, even as the soldiers revved the cackling engines

to run him over again. Even when our men cheated

on us again and again. Papí should have died that day.

It took one man to stand between him and the soldiers.

It took one man to yell stop and defend his good name.

In English, witness is a translation of martyr. In Spanish,

testificar comes from wagering your flesh on the truth.

Power forgets some of us survive to tell the story.

The man lived. The soldiers fled. Papí lived,

and slowly, we massaged his ribs back into place.

For weeks, we put warm milk on his tongue.

The swelling stopped. He relearned how to walk.

Some of his daughters still hide in barriles

de frijol, others are mastering the art

of walking away.

Mama, 53

Where we see Mama’s back

At the border, the coyote forced Mama to run with the men,

as punishment for refusing to be raped with the other women.

I do not know how to describe the way the sand

bit into the soles of her feet, inching further & further

until it became her skin, her flesh. I do not

know how to describe the way each step felt like

it was underwater when there was no

water, when sweat became dry beads of salt,

of sand stumbling down her face

until they became her face. Mama,

a sand woman, her throat

hissing like wind & snakes.

       Her thighs rubbed

together so hard they

       bled a dry red,

stones sharp as

       crescents

cutting her

       feet.

Then, came the hills.

In this poem,

        we will end

the story here, where

        Mama finally rests,

where her fallen hands are

        already buried wrist-deep

in the desert. In this poem, every

-thing Mama carried finally

falls off her back—the eight hungry heads

of her hermanos y hermanas roll down

the hills, the hungrier machetes of the soldiers’ stick 

from the sand like needles of giant cacti, her torn

shirt exposing the pale brown ripple of her spine, finally uncurling.

I want there to be a version of this story where she no longer

suffers, where for once another god performs the miracle, the atonement

of blood & limb, where we no longer live with the guilt of her sacrifice.

In this poem, a man lifts Mama onto his shoulders & carries her the rest

of the way. This man is the same man who stood up when

the coyote wanted to put Mama with the women & told him, no,

she is my sister, we will not part. When the coyote yells

for him to leave her behind to dissolve into the dust,

this man carries Mama like the sky carries the

moon, the light we see by in the dark, the only pure

thing in the sky. This man is my father,

sitting by her hospital bed, massaging her back

—No, in this poem, my father is in

the hospital bed, howling to the heavens

as the doctor pulls me bloody

from his body, both our feet flailing 

      in dissent. This man is each of

her unborn children, closing her

       eyes, nursing her dry lips

with our bone & blood. This

       man is you right now,

reader, holding this page,

       carrying this unholy

burden for the shortest

       of moments so,

for once, you can

understand

how quic-

kly you

would

colla-

pse.

Homecoming

The last days of Abuela Tina’s life

she would leave the house

for hours, walking miles

down dirt roads. I imagine

her murmuring or singing,

although the flint-lipped woman

rarely said anything to me.

She would embrace me, hands

clasped around my temples,

her kisses so faint I cannot

remember them. On the news

or in a movie, a man would die

and she would complain to my mother.

Once, driving down the freeway,

my father pointed at a mountain

pasture and declared, I own

everything as far as your eye

can see, and she believed him.

Once, she threw handfuls of water

over her face from a stream, moaning

gleefully as white people passed.

As far as I could tell, she only slept

and made tortillas. Mama flew

to El Salvador to watch her die. 

When she returned, she told

the story of a restless woman.

A breathless cousin chases her

and brings her back to the house.

The next morning she wakes up

murmuring, this is not my home.

¿Where is your home? they ask,

and she tells them about San Agustín,

years before the war, before half of them

were born. Like Abuela, I want to return

to something that belongs to me. I should

have died by now to stick my bones

in the ground like crucifixes and reclaim it

as mine. Soldiers would fire slugs

at my ghost, and I would pour streams

of dirt over my face and laugh.