The Mannequin The doll looks at me One eye opens One arm unhinged I fall, fall down Are plastic and wood really good to make people of? Please turn around so I can see your face If I see you, I can see myself Broken holes need mending I stuff clay into her wounds and pray I am all her broken pieces I am all my broken baby dolls Do you recognize me from the back of my head Do I recognize myself from the back of my head A round hole of wire, once covered with plaster of Paris Why Paris? Is that where all the dictators from Chile, Argentina, the U. S. of A. ran off to? The Rue de la Pari I look more carefully now I see you seeing me I see myself Shama Beach

THERE IS A FOG

There is a fog.
There is always a fog.
It is there in the soil where a grave is dug.
It is there in the photograph when the light
is turned off.

It is there in the mouth where teeth
are broken, where words were stolen.
There is always fog.
It is there around the head that is missing.

It is there where her shawl was covering
her shoulders, now only dust rises.
It is there under the table where electric wires
snap themselves onto ankles.

There is always fog.
It is there where the face in the mirror
has only bleeding eyes, where the ears
are holes breathing black smoke.

It is there where the shadow of a bird
flies across the ceiling of a room
without windows.

It is here in my pen writing the names
of the disappeared in invisible ink.

There are children in the fog. Their faces
never fade away. Their eyes are moons.
There is always fog.
I shall bottle it with my daughter's tears.

WHAT THE NIGHT REQUIRES Quando la Noche Obliga The night is no darker than it ever was. The pattern of stars hasn’t changed or their number or brightness. The moon observes its usual phases. Like dogs baying at sunlit rocks, we wrote such nonsense. Darkness never fled at sunrise. It mugged our hearts. Shadows were always long somewhere. Laughter was often ironic. How cleverly our poetry evolves! We write of the moon and call it a searchlight. As for these bullet holes in the helmet of the sky, wishing on stars or anything else is obsolete.p Patricia Lee Sharpe

Finger Paint
(Upon Looking at a Photo of a Finger With String Around it)

I remember the day
Rosa handed me the Rose of Remembrance

Long after the petals died
I smelled her fragrance on my fingers

The thorns on the rose drew blood
I fingerpainted a rose in blood

In Rosa’s memory
her fragrance still lingers

fingering my conscience
not letting me rest in peace
until my fingers bleed her name
my voice paints her story.

Masked Ball AS a form of protest the graduating class held a costume ball instead of a Senior Prom As a protest they danced the Minute waltz in a frenzied 30 seconds while waving anti-government slogans The riot squad masqueraded in whisking them off to jail Never to be seen again There were two survivors Manuel and Mara who were making a baby on the girls’ bathroom floor When Maria’s mother did not come working under cover they tried to resurrect the faces one by one of classmates all they could remember Afraid to whisper classmates’ names they gave each a symbol The elements cooperated sending gentle rain to mask the whispers of their voices and their pens.

Upon First Hearing Of The Disappeared

We held lighted candles
at the mass grave site
chanted prayers
joined palms
cried psalms
called out names
carved a bulto
from wood riddled
with bullet holes
christened it
Mother of the Disappeared.
Our communion wine
the blood of martyrs
our bread, their bodies broken.
We held a mass.


JUST BECAUSE
NOVEMBER 3

A grave of a camposanto
Gravestones surrounded by unressurrected bones
A field of fossil heads
Like unharvested pumpkins
on this Day of the Dead

For what just cause
what grave reason
would I be willing martyr
could I be unwilling victim

I write many words
Erase the vast majority
an eraser the apt instrument
for the Disappeared
But they resurrect
unwilling to let me
rest in peace

I must stay alive
to state their case
so humane humanity
will not be
a species disappeared
Just be the Cause.

The River river sifts limbs swallows bones light softens waves settling longings into sand shadows vanish in lapping rhythm ebb flow ebb flow Anna Katherine

order leaving

order seeps
leaks away
leaving the green gone past
where deer nibbled
rivers rippled
and darkness soothed
my dreams
not the dark that now creeps
contagious
dissolving familiar forms
as blind, I grope my hand
towards sane memory
but meet only oozing air
a slow drip dripping
of ardent play
ageless truths
tender customs
triste y viejo

Anna Katherine


the waiting mirror

a mirror waits
shiny as a growing seed
urgent as an empty womb
eager to match that old photo next to it
meet it reflecting
startled young eyes
the exact same nose
the right trembling mouth
which will not be smiling
which will be crying
in wonder
for that distant body memory
dreamed of, disbelieved parents
met at long long last
yet still always missing
until wings lift reunite them
in a world of love
and sighs

Anna Katherine

Los Desparecidos They all could have died here - ended up as skulls on scarves floating across rooms that lend themselves to vacancy and hidden voltage. You don’t notice until you start to look, until you hear the echoes split heads, between 72’ and 78’ 72’ and 78’ 72’ and 78’ outlets and juice, everyday mothers left wondering, everyday *** we pledge allegiance to the fracturing of the tierra del mundo, la facia, los brazos, la tete. The splintered pieces might fit together differently, in Cambodia, or Darfur, or Afghanistan, where young girls ignite to escape isolation and brutality. Ragit Salum. Eleven years old, sold by her father to a village elder. Everyday she was raped by the toothless old man and his sons. She’s happy to lay bandaged in a fly infested burn unit, because she is free now. She is free. *** we snatch men out of houses in the middle of the night, and stick them right between the Geneva Convention and cowboy justice. We hood them faceless and attach electrodes until their breath comes through the roots of sizzled hair, outlets and juice, everyday mothers left wondering. Everyday. Christy Ferrato

Ergonomics of Torture

Whip needs a soft comfortable grip. Just one key on the key ring. Too many, although fearsome in appearance, may cause distraction.
.22 pointed at eye level, too much strain on the muscles of the eye, please lower it just a quarter of an inch. Ah, much better.

My food bowl, will you be so kind to buy one for me with rounded edges? Now that my fingers are smashed, I’m just a bit clumsy with it and drop most of its contents. No, did I say that. It’s delicious for 3 week old corn meal mush.

Thank you for the 600 threat count sheets. I truly appreciate this regal comfort. Posture pedic. Fetal position , the current trend in prison yoga posture.

Daily calisthenics: I do my leg lifts, side stretches and push-ups. Tilting my head side to side has been a little difficult with the spiked choke chain. I will learn to LIVE with it.

This comprehensive look into the establishment of ergonomics as an effective measure against retaliation has its benefits.

These accommodations have been nothing but the highest standard. Please allow me to convey this gratitude before I am reunited with my family. Why are you laughing? I didn’t mean my ancestors.


Dorothy Stenberg

Disintegrating Mannequin Bones bleaching, unhinged, the center no longer holds against unyielding force. Are you willing yourself back to dust, a shield for your imitation flesh? You are luckier than us, the imitated, los desaparecidos. Your blank stare knows nothing. Not like Fernando, or Maria or me. We saw, we felt, we knew what we suffered. We have gone. We are dust. Elizabeth Trickey

Reunion: For Los Desaparecidos

In your eyes I see
a picture of hope, happiness,
no thought for the future.
You were in eighth grade.
Row upon row
of wide open mischievous faces,
and bright white teeth.
The only pain any of you ever felt
perhaps, was from some teacher's scolding,
or youthful awkwardness.
Not loss. The loss felt today for
brothers, sisters, fathers, friends.
Where are their bones?
What do they look like now?
They must have holes for their eyes,
holes for ears, holes where bullets
shattered their skulls. They match
holes left behind with those who remain.
The hole in a bed they would have shared
with a wife, a husband,
holes in the field
where their children might have played,
holes in their mother's hearts,
the holes in the picture of a class reunion
that will never take place.

Elizabeth Trickey

Their Faces Written in Water There is a great, big innocent river, its beating heart useless to hide the lost souls washing like sand churned through rivulets made of drops that have congregated one by one until they are a flood an unstoppable brown flood that veils the earth's shame. It rushes away from our crimes, the criminals still among us, their victims floating in this great silence. I know the earth is sad, so sad. I see its tears in this big-hearted river. Elizabeth Trickey

Into the River They Threw Them
- Photograph of moving water in an anonymous locale
on the Rio de la Plata separating Uraguay and Argentina
by Marcelo Brodsky, Argentinian

I glimpse your blood in these red-brown waters.
I hear your last despairing and disappearing cries.
The river washes over me. I want to turn away
from your falling and the shadowy heads above you.

I should take my anger away, but I'm rooted to the ground.
It may be something I owe you--to stand in your last night,
to witness your dying under a sorrowing moon, to honor
this watery grave, the currents bearing your name to oblivion.

I can't do this. You're dragging me down. I'll just move on
and forget you, turn to distractions and leave you. But how--
with your wrists handcuffed to mine--can I fail you? What's the use?
Whatever I do, the day of the dead will pass again and again.

The uncaring river will flow on through the lives of the mourners
while its eddies devour you. Your voice will remain trapped
in the silt of its depths. There will be no balm of lilies and candles
and incense at the end of long days. No welcoming earth.

You are gone. You will not return from this river. The undertow
will carry you farther away. No words are written on waves.
Not one word of mine can bring you back. The world is empty
without you. What right do I have to grieve?

I ask those who walked with you: Please don't be offended.
Let us take hands and say: May the waters deliver you
gently. May the ocean be your shroud.
May seagulls skirl your name on the final shore.

Frances Hunter


Ayyy life

You greet me push toward me across
the kitchen table an empty cup in silence we sit
next to each other you pour me one like yours
outside the windows A jagged symphony the crackle
of bones pop like the star shells back home on the summer
lake on the fourth they mimic the twilight we devoured
with feasts of macaroni salad and apple pie

I look inside the warm jelly glass jar seeking the words I must ask:

Why do you grow in a cup full of blue wine?
“Because in that moment you were listening.”

Alicia Deamistad


A Love Poem

“Those who do not dance drift inside interminable shade”

you tell me

as I pluck the tacks from your nails
pick out the shrapnel in your wrists

as I wipe warm droplets from your fingertips
with water I’ve heated on the stove

and you grasp my hand --- my unblemished palm---

and you kiss its center with such tenderness

“el agua que caressa me”
you whisper

as you reach to the place
where my neck meets my ear

and you kiss me there too.

Alicia Deamistad

The Calling of Bicycles - Urban Intervention with photographs in the City of Rosario by Fernando Traverso, 1001 When Traverso's fellow workers in the resistance movement in Rosario, Argentina, disappeared, leaving their bicycles abandoned, he spray-painted the outlines of 350 bicycles propped against various buildings, one for each of the missing, and photographed them. Bicycles know what happened to their owners. They remember each name. They are memorials; they bear witness. Bicycles make the disappeared visible. They heard the prayers for long life. They hold the wails of mothers, the grieving of family and friends. Bicycles refused to be erased. They are etched inside my eyelids. They mourn in silence, will not be silenced; their silence is loud. Bicycles are the weeping that does not stop. They intervene between memory and amnesia. They keep the record open at every page. Bicycles bear their crosses daily. They will not be liquidated, terminated, taken out dispatched, wasted, zapped. They will not use euphemisms. Bicycles will call a crime a crime. They are the custodians of history. They will not close their eyes. Bicycles do not sleep. They wish to change the world. They will be the winds of change. Bicycles are their brothers' keepers. They will not be moved. They protest complicity. Bicycles say they will not take up arms. They want to ride into minds. They will not lie down under the heel of the oppressor. Bicycles look for their owners in Argentina and Armenia, Colombia, Cambodia and Kosovo, Santiago and Soweto, Venezuela and Vilna, in every region covered in black. Bicycles rejoice that life goes on, that there is still light. They sing in the wilderness. They remember that love made the world. Bicycles live in harmony with all bicycles. They will not forgive until they hear the words: "I am guilty." They yearn for the truth; they believe in justice. Bicycles are waiting. Frances Hunter

The Jar I keep a blue flask, inside it an ear and a portrait. Pablo Neruda You too may have a blue flask. I, to my sorrow, have a fruit jar. You will not want to hear this but when long shadows are falling it is no time for talk of wine and roses. In another country I learned that despair destroys breath, pain destroys language, brutality destroys humanity. It should not happen elsewhere. I keep a glass jar, inside it a hand and a portrait ever since I learned that a policeman kept a jar in his office, on his desk or on the windowsill, perhaps tenderly moved back and forth like an African violet needing light and air, but not too much, and inside the jar was the hand of activist Sicelo, longing for him in his grave. Frances Hunter

AL NIÑO QUE NACIÓ EL 5 DE DICIEMBRE DE 1976
(To the Boy Who Was Born on December 5, 1976)

She looks to the camera:
lips parted, light eyes
face open and clear, inviting you
closer, like a future friend
like your favorite teacher
like the mother you invented
when you resented the one you had.

He smiles not with his lips
but with the cells in a face
as tender as if he were welcoming you.

She was thirty weeks heavy
on the sixteenth of October
when the cell opened and shut
at La Cacha in La Plata, close to
the river where they threw prisoners
from airplanes. He was seen
captive at el Pozo de Banfield.

People who survived el Pozo
de Quilmes say you were born
there, blond and blue eyed,
on the fifth of December.

How many times did
your lips wrap her nipples
before soldiers ripped you away?
Do you drink from her now
when you drink from the faucet?
Her name was Stella.
His was Jorge.

Susan Hazen-Hammond


IN THE SPACES BETWEEN WORDS

Mi hija, my daughter, must have twisted in the doorway and flung
my grandmother's gold ring back into the house as soldiers
dragged her through. I found it on my knees in the pasillo
between the kitchen and el living in the weeks when I was trying
to touch each piece that remained, as if that could save her
and your father and you. I pictured places they might have
jailed her, did not guess names I would know, thought instead
of mud walls streaked with trails of the vinchuca, from whose bite
only light could protect her. I saw her lying in the dark
as the thin knife of the beetle entered her finger. Would she
know there was no danger she would live long enough to die
gasping from mal de chagas? As her belly swelled towards birth,
did she hear children in vacant lots or babies crying in hallways
from wanting their mothers? Did she smell the blood
that flowed so deep, it could have smeared every street?

Knowing I could not know, I marked the hour of your birth
as the night I woke up to a knife of pain between my thighs,
as if she were being born again. Weeks later, a scream sat me up
in the dark: I marked that as the hour of her death and prayed
beside the bed until dawn. I rode trains into Retiro and out,
on lines like spokes on a smashed wheel, lit by rays from a lost sun.
I walked up and down streets named for generals, past women
wearing furs from Paris or Rome, spent days beneath buildings,
riding the subte, watching for one face in a city of twelve million.
Were you girl or boy, niña or varón? Would your mother's eyes
reveal you? Would I hear her in your laugh? Or see your father's
curls and long cheeks on a child in the park eating churros or maní?
Back and forth I rode the ferry between Buenos Aires and Colonia
eying muddy waves for bones and wondering what the man who turned
you into his son or daughter was telling you about life and good behavior.

What do men who kill children teach a child about killing?
Can you see your mother's face in your cheek bones and nose
or feel the love that wraps around you, no matter who
you've become? Wake up. Wake up. In the gaps
between words the gods can stamp a round world flat.

Susan Hazen-Hammond


INVENTION

Who invented the rule that the fingers of art
must not touch dead bodies? As if doña Sebastiana,
la muerte, death, must not paint, sculpt,
or draw with the materials life hands her.

See the color of the blood?—A wash on blue eyes.
See the angles of severed arms pointing back
towards the torso? Notice the toes, arranged like
pebbles between flowers in a portrait of Our Lady.

Look at the hair tied to a tree limb and what hangs
beneath it, then try to repeat, with the warrior king,
David, "I have been young and now I am old.
Yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken."

Susan Hazen-Hammond


MOMENT

Here. Over here. On the streets
of Buenos Aires. See the face
of a porteña who may have been
shopping in el centro in the cold.
She is probably hungry and sleepy,
and her breasts have swollen.
Maybe that was how she knew,
two weeks or three after her missed period,
that something more than blood
would slip out between her legs.

Now she is walking on Calle Lavalle.
At El Palacio de la Papa Frita,
she looks in at diners eating steaks
topped with eggs, goes in and orders:
bife de chorizo a caballo. She has eaten
two bites when the cattle prod
of nausea jolts her in the throat.
She waits, but eats no more, then pays
and walks again. Back there
by that passageway, near where
Lavalle crosses Calle Florida–is that
where uniforms full of bones
shoved her into a car, not guessing
they kidnapped a baby, too?

If the child born that hot February
thirty years back looks in this mirror
and sees, for the first time,
her bones and skin, will that
be the moment he first glimpses
the twisted womb we are born into,
the monster we must live in?

Susan Hazen-Hammond

OF ALL THE DISAPPEARED for María Teresa Ravignani, kidnapped on June 8, 1976, in Buenos Aires, pregnant two months Of all the disappeared, yours is the face that is most mine: the line of your cheek sliding down, the lay of your eyebrows, the thickness of your hair, the curve of your chin, nicked by the camera. When I compare you with the mirrors on each side of your photograph, I find only this difference: you glow with hope, as if seeing some future I have never imagined so that my face matches yours the way tiny purple flowers in Jujuy or Catamarca freeze dry in June and seem to bloom all winter, but the winds of spring blow them away. Do you lie in the ground or in the mud beneath the river? Do I breathe your ashes? Were you the scream when I yelled that my mother is not mine? Susan Hazen-Hammond

WAS

It was not a mannequin.
It was a person.
It was the rising
and falling of a hand.

The cell was wet.
Or it was cold.
It was hot.
It was night.

It was stone.
It was wood.
It was gun.
It was knife.

Still, someone
among the thousands
must have sung
as she died.

Susan Hazen-Hammond


Shroud

Vapor, mist, fog, veil
Blur vision - erase reality
Amnesia prevails.
No desire to face the truth -
Masked men deliver electric shock to your body
my mind.
Present time
past lost,
Truth eluded easily
In the face of self inflicted blindness.

Juliet Myers

The action of moon on water The ebb and flow, that’s it it’s always that. No matter – no matter. Empty full - high low - known unknown withdrawn hidden - obscured denied. How to miss the obvious content forbids contentment, awaken to the fullness of knowledge. Powerless before the flow, overwhelmed by the flood of evidence. Witness, witness - say it is so. Juliet Myers

The Final Container

No remains, no urn necessary to hold the coarse ash, bits of bone
Nothing to transport, enshrine, or cast upon the wind.

Gone, no really gone, devoid of evidence, how shall we mourn
The moist decay of tree and leaf, of flesh and bone denied?

Only memory contains the truth of passing life, of loss
This final verse an urn does make, simple not ornate.

Juliet Myers


Seeing Corpses
The naso-gastric tube is removed
The urinary catheter is deflated and removed.
The subclavian intravenous line is extracted.
EKG moniter pads are pealed off.
A cotton chin strap is applied around the crown of the head
To under the chin.
This strap keeps the mouth shut and prevents drainage
Of fluids from the buccal cavity.
Cotton pads are placed in the rectum to prevent seepage.
A toe tag is applied to the great toe of the left foot
With the patient's name, age, Date of birth, doctor's name.
The corpse is rolled into a white plastic body bag
And escorted to the morgue along with eye wear,
Dentures and other personal effects.


For Grandmother
I will tell your grandmother
That we found you.
That we covered your exposed body.
That we washed and combed your hair.
We bound your wounds.
You did not speak or cry.
We buried you in your land
And covered your grave with marigolds.

Kathamann

WHAT THE X-RAYS SHOW (in response to Sara Maneiro’s series of 12 C-prints of dental records from Venezuela’s mass graves (“Berenice’s Grimace,” 1995), on view at SITE Santa Fe as part of The Disappeared exhibit, November 2007) Even the disappeared have teeth, a dark landscape of shattered crowns. Teeth are placekeepers, bridges across roots, cyclers, the part that chews madness through the night, keepers of voices, fists in a sepia fight, a thick headless torso on top of a grassless hill, forceps, a high chair for the stricken, a clothespin on a backwards line. Of the 65 missing, I enter 12 mouths, sit on the cold floor, watch a trilogy of lovers in a darkened space, a queue of soldiers, a chipped pyramid of fallen stones, a swing of missing tastes, sheep at night, a circle opening from the side, a dusty heart split in half, the album of a jaw. I watch teeth barrel up and back along missing crescents, the teeth are lengthened, drilled, ground, each one biting uncertain hope in a willing mouth.

THE BONE FLAG
(based on Arturo Duclos’ flag of bones (“Untitled”),
on view at SITE Santa Fe as part of The Disappeared exhibit, November 2007)

How should I describe the emblem of a crying country?
A star of fragile bones screwed tight against each other,
empty blood branches with a dull deep hum,
limbs hurtling into the fortress of another person –

Oh dreams! where have you gone? I’d trade the bottle
for a cup of kisses, my fingernails for calamity.

A bird caught between ground and cage
is a dead number, a brilliant blue flag of lost chances.

Lauren Camp


Los Desaparecidos

(Synthesizing the multiple elements of poetry read, and elements and quotes from the exhibit, itself)

The Powers that Be decided that hearts were beating uselessly. And so they violently created a new reality – a tapestry of somber and disparate threads, each a separate life, sacrificed on the insistent altar of this new world. Beauty and everyday life, behind bars. A catastrophic sorrow in your eyes. The names of all the fallen, in light, where they belong. “He practiced every day” – the intimate knowledge of pain, and its purposeful relegation to oblivion. The act of a true shaman of this new reality.

The senses, and their attendant messages, take on a new and altogether treacherous life. “He recoiled, unmarked” – save for his soul. “His breath came through the roots of his hair”, the only nerveless route left now, for that most basic of needs. “Gradually, the time became a razor”, efficiently slicing off sections of life into the thinnest shadow of its former self. Bicycles populate the city now, each like the passage of a soul through life, insistent markers of memory.

These, truly, are great expanses now: a cavernous canvas of life, filled with silent screams and unseeing eyes – where once was painted in brilliant color the reality of Light.

Marcela Cruz

FLAGS (based on Arturo Duclos’ Chilean flag made of 66 human femurs in the exhibit, Los Desaparecidos) I gaze at this flag of Chile made of human bones, bones held together by love, bones of people who had dreams bursting out of their breasts; bones of our ancestors, bones of children bereft of their burials, bones of those who could not escape. This flag makes me think of my country, the United States. We also have a flag made out of bones: bones of those who died in Iraq, bones of those who died in Afghanistan, bones of those who also had dreams bursting out of their breasts: dreams that took them to foreign countries to fight wars created by men with delusions, men who were neither sleeping nor awake, men who helped to create a new American flag made of our warriors’ bones. Two countries whose stars and stripes destroyed our dreams-- dreams for our young children, dreams for our struggling families, dreams shattered by regimes lusting for power, dreams shattered by guns and violence. Now we wave our flags of broken dreams. Marcia Starck

MY FRIEND FROM ARGENTINA

Mariel, my friend from Argentina remembers:
she remembers her classmates,
classmates who came to school with tears
in their eyes,
tears for their fathers who were gone,
(fathers who suddenly disappeared in the middle of the night;)
tears for their mothers who were alive,
alive trying to feed their children
fearing what would happen to them all.

Mariel, my friend from Argentina remembers”
she remembers the next door neighbor,
the kind gray haired gentleman
who greeted her on the way to school.
Often he gave her some chocolate,
even fixed her brother’s bicycle.
One day he was no longer there
no longer there to greet her,
no longer there to put that sweet piece of chocolate
in her hand.

Mariel, my friend from Argentina remembers,
she remembers her brother Horatio leaving home,
her brother sent to school in Georgia
to study photography where it was safe,
in America.
Horatio leaving in the middle of the night,
the plane ticket, his ticket to freedom.
Would she ever see her brother again?

Mariel, my friend from Argentina remembers,
she remembers her father at dinner:
“We will not speak of your brother Horatio.
we don’t’ know where he has gone”.
“We will not speak about our next door neighbor,”
“We will eat our dinner,
we will be silent,
we will be safe.”

Marcia Starck


PEDRO PINOZA

Pedro Pinoza,
Pedro Pinoza, hearing your name makes me tremble
Pedro Pinoza, you knocked on my friend Elisa’s door
that cold dark night in Buenos Aires.
took her father to jail,
took her neighbor to jail.
It was you Pedro who tortured them.

Pedro Pinoza, you have many faces and many names.
You were the Israeli soldier who broke down the door of the house in Ramallah,
told the family their home would be demolished,
made them gather their belongings in one hour
while the baby cried and the children hid in fear.

Pedro Pinoza, you.are the American guard
who put black masks on the prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
who held the leashes of snarling dogs.
Pedro Pinoza, one day you, too, will receive a medal
for your service in Iraq.

Pedro Pinoza, you entered the refugee camp in Darfur,
grabbed one of the young virgins,
tore off her clothes,
lay her down in the dirt and raped her.
Bloody and broken, she returned to the camp.

Pedro Pinoza, your strange looking eyes and terrible smile
are in posters all over the globe.
Pedro Pinoza, your face haunts my dreams.

Marcia Starck

THE RIVER PLATE (based on photographs of the river in Argentina) Harvest full moon shines brightly above the hills. as we ride our bicycles to the river. We gaze at brown muddy waters, watch the waters churning and gurgling. We place our bicycles in a large circle, stand together by the river to pray. We pray for all our families, families for whom, this river is a tomb. Rose petals are floating on the river, pink gardenias line the bank next to our bicycles. We feed chocolates and sweets to the river, sweets for our loved ones who are buried here. Our tears fall into the swirling current, some day these tears will cleanse our country. We watch the river flow and ebb, We watch the river Plate carry our prayers to the sea. Marcia Starck

A Hand Embedded with Nails

A long and tapered nail

Has pierced her delicate hand--
As you said these words, for once I was glad I did
Not see or feel her
Dark blood.

Even as I long to drift away, as
My mother once did, saying what will
Be will be, you say there's a mirror where
Each of us can see our own faces.
I or you could have been pulled into the dark,
Dragged away,
Erased and splintered into bone and white ash.
Did I say I am lucky?--a

Woman allowed to create her own torture then
I can turn and walk away at will; no need to
Tell me how to be
Happy and dense with ignorance;

Now that the hand has dissolved
Along the border between sleep and waking.

Mary McGinnis


Disappeared

This is the flag of your country
A star has fallen on it
And turned it to bone.
How shall these femurs dance?
Shall they waltz backwards,
A lady in blue silk high heels,
Or two-step in cowboy hat and belt buckle
Or twist in a now outdated neon glo mini-skirt
The kind of thing that will make you laugh
Years later
If you live
Years later.

You don’t know
What will become of us--
The photograph of the family dinner,
The smiling classmates,
The polaroid of the afternoon at the lake.
If you live you will page
Through the album
Exclaiming over the dated hairstyle
The ridiculous mini-skirt.
But if you are murdered, dumped, flesh decomposed
No one laughs thirty years later at your hairstyle
There is no middle-aged you
To be secretly pleased
At how slim and lovely you were
Although you didn’t feel it at the time.

And you left your bicycle
Blue, chained on the back portal.
A riderless horse may go free
But we left the bicycle chained
As if still expecting you on this earth.
after all, you were the one with the key.
A messenger between two worlds
the bicycle sits
Beneath birds’ abandoned nests
Covered in spiderwebs
And yellow apricot leaves.

The dream is a negative place
You step into, filled with desire.
The ruined mannequin, no matter how disintegrated
Still implies something lovely--
A navy blue dress with white roses,
A hat with a feather.
No wonder chairs hang on he walls

And you can write only in pencil,
With a stick in the sand
Or a little finger.

Now, whoever looks at your photograph
Must weep.
What happened
To the child you carried,
Your memories
That won’t stay neatly pressed in a book
Like words in Spanish
O dried petals.
Rather, like ashes
Tossed on the waves of a river
What we hoped to forget
The wind casts back at us,
Fragments
That although destroyed
Are still a recognizable
Part of this story.

Miriam Sagan

I Look For A Comparison Within Myself Text taken from a response of the government of Uruguay to an inquiry from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and some lines from Pablo Neruda. Suicides Take place What night forces Regrettable, does not Justify responsibility In prison There ae some great sunken expanses Mental imbalance In prison After a normal social life I am old and sad In prison Of a personal nature Regrettable events I keep a blue flask Like suicide Psychological Imbalance In prison In the social environment Deliberately omitted Which night forces Deliberately omitted Passing from one day toward another. Miriam Sagan

ANESTHETICS

I study this modern mosaic,
this mock disarray precisely hung
on a gallery wall, making a major effort
to feel the feelings I’m meant
to feel.

But all
I see
is art-
fulness.

A doll.

A mannequin.

Abused.

Dis mem ber ed

And then

ar
tis tic
ally
re
ar ran
ged
for
the public,
to gawk
at.

(And by the way,
here’s the price list.)

Patricia Lee Sharpe


THE NOT KNOWING

Kissinger knew.
About Chile. About Argentina.
About Uruguay.
The State Department knew.
The President knew.
We all did,
if we wanted to.
We washed, instead,
our manicured hands
in Culliganed water,
with lavender-scented soap,
and went to the movies.
Like rustling candy bar wrappers,
like the rancid smell of chemicals sold
as butter
for popcorn,
the lacerating truth was all
around us,
but the movie served
to distract us,
to soothe us,
to overwrite any suspicions
in our palimpsest minds.

Patricia Lee Sharpe

HO(W)L?(!) It isn’t easy to picture hell. Dante’s too wordy for us now. Brueghel’s almost comically explicit. Conrad toyed with skulls on spears en ro(u)te to the very heart of evil, then stopped short, with Kurtz, and a guttural sufficiency. Two words, Three syllables, Five letters. “The horror!” The g(a)(u)rgle of death. In this exhibit, the chairs convey the ga(s)ping loss. Crude. Empty. Chairs. Tumbling around. In space. No coordinates. No G.P.S. The (s)hell we live in. Patricia Lee Sharpe