On the Banks of El Sauce, La Únion,1990
It was a year after the final offensive
and three years before the peace accords
Seven years after we first met in the house
my parents raised me to hunger
for what they left behind.
Ysaura, you were tiny and mine, singing can-dan-dui-can-dan-dui
while holding our chihuahua en tus manos de Lenca
A smile captured by a disposable camera.
Boy soldiers captured by Atlacatl. You had made it this far to remember
the songs killed in 1932, Cacaopera turned campesino you married a man named Catalino.
The war hadn't reached
these far corners of our tierra, nuestro rincón
where I was pulled out into the street
in front of your house
so the neighbors could see
chubby chelita granddaughter
in white ESPRIT denim shorts
to signal we were doing well in the North.
We drove 3 miles per hour
through a difficult terrain that reminds me
of Arivaca today and tomorrow,
atravesando el departamento
para llegar al cantón.
No one mentioned a war simmering around us.
We rolled over sharp rocks careful
to not puncture the tires of our vehicle.
Seeing el Río Sauce, its rocky edges, its pebbled floor,
the river, a constant
when you lost four babies,
when the man who fathered those babies
drank his earnings, another hunger punching holes in this memory,
when your tears traced a map along your tired veins
and each morning brought you newer mourning,
a day and its alloted grief, could we be rebirthed,
if we lie face down
a baptism in the waters
that whip through a countryside
forgotten by its country
Chaparrastique, 1990
These movements feel quick even though the loneliness persists and that afternoon it didn’t feel hot or steamy even though the volcano in San Miguel looked like it contained enough heat and steam and lava and ash to cover the city, be its blackened carpet, what you might find after a burning house stops burning. A volcano is so many shapes come to life, a transnational geometry I could get lost in, it has circles and conic technology, an upside down ice cream cone dripping a sauce hotter than shrapnel. That day it stood so still it loomed larger the farther away we got. My mind was playing tricks on me. But so was desire. I longed for its power, its inarguable magnificence. I wanted nature to be left in its majesty. I wanted to stop seeing bodies strewn along the side of the Pan-American waiting for their names. These losses dotted the periphery the further away we got from the volcano. I remember catching sight of Tía Haydee’s face. She had the same expression as the Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange shot during the Great Depression. The deep creases in my mother’s sister’s face, the quiet one, the humble one, the evangelical one, were the lines that held the loss the most. In 1984 I was six years old in Bell Gardens, California, watching my mother get word. Attacked and hog-tied in a small apartment in Apopa. A bullet passed through Tía Haydee’s. A large part of her died with Fabricio that day.
It looms larger the further
away I get.
•••
Raquel Gutiérrez was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where she/they just completed two MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. Raquel is a 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Raquel also runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects (est. 2014), which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. Her/Their poetry and essays have recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Open Space, FENCE, Río Grande Review, The VOLTA, Foglifter, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her/their first book, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in the Spring of 2021. And Raquel’s first book of poetry, Southwest Reconstruction, will be published by Noemi Press in 2022.