This next one is titled "43," and it
is about the students of Guerrero, Mexico, who were
disappeared, murdered in 2014.
"Their bodies have not yet been found.
The moment before death, the air inexplicably
tastes of wet horse.
The chest expands, and something unspools like wet vines.
In this land of child brides and teenage assassins,
a bus full of students dissolves into the mountain mist--
a retinue of beheaded journalists
mouth clues while the young president delivers platitudes.
But what do they matter?
The students don't know the kilos
of heroin stored below them.
A boy of 18 eyes gray as bath water charts
a man's face under his black mask.
Why even bother, the boy wonders?
The night's only witnesses, the stars.
An ocelot, a single strand of hair caught in a barbed wire.
Even the zopilotes won't eat the blood of the unsayable.
The blood birds hiss and grunt while a man with pointed teeth
whistles a love song.
Why waste time with metaphors?
The body is kindling.
The body is a plastic bouquet shriveled.
At a crossing, the trees bow and weep,
but everybody knows the rain revises nothing.
The charred bones belong to no one.
Beyond the verdant mountain, a caravan of mothers and fathers
beg a cankered country for the locus of cruelty.
Farther, a troupe of camouflaged men
burn fields of red poppies--
those lovely flowers of happiness and squalor."