WEBVTT

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Let's start with a
poem called "The Line,"

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and there is some
mention of the lynching

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of Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans in this poem

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just as a heads up
and there is also

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some reflection on
copper mining in it

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and growing up in a
copper mining town.

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The epigraph is "a
serious surplus population

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that needs eliminating."

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So now we are equals, verdad?

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All along, eyeing
the same banks,

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As though we might
surface on the same shore,

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Bare backs to the sun,
wet shirts in hand,

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boots aside, those too.

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You keep saying El otro lado,

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See you there face
to face, no worries.

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The last good lynching
was a long time ago.

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Ropes, belts, canteens
sway in the tree.

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The trees sings with lightness.

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In time the fruit
shrank in the heat,

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Grinned wide from the bone,

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Dropped to the dirt.

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Rot.

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The earthworm's heart.

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This now, a knot,
a fishing spot.

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The sweet blood smell of
the hook right through,

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The impaled form right through,

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Either soft end
writhing on the line.

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Beneath the surface neither
vertebral nor articulate.

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It sways under water,

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Guts in skin.

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It sways from the
other side, verdad?

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Not a lure but a rumor,

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A mirror of parallel end.

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We'd fished the shallows
with stripped willows,

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With a hellgrammite
drifting in the current.

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And that's where we
trapped our leviathan.

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Iridescent scales that
slid away from our hands

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Where we crossed
the swinging bridge

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And found effigy and sign:

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Death to scabs
crossing the line.

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A volleyball head and a
pair of shovels for limbs,

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The hanging white sheet,
the slashed body of many.

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The hanging white sheet,
the slashed body of many.

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A volleyball head and a
pair of shovels for limbs,

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Effigy and sign, death to
scabs crossing the line.

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Where we crossed
the swinging bridge,

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And found iridescent scales
that slid away from our hands,

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And that's where we
trapped our leviathan.

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With a hellgrammite
drifting in the current,

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We'd fished the shallows
with stripped willows.

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Y verdad, the cities on
either side of the river

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Watch one another from the
eyes of their televisions.

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Their headlines
race beneath glass.

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They have taken
my father's body,

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And I do not know where
they have laid him.

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Glass and light.

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Love as the sinker,
the line sinking deep.

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The last time I saw my
father was in a dream,

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Seated on every side of
the table of ancestors,

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And belonging so fully
he ceased to exist.

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They arrived on the
other side at the tree,

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At the end of this world,

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And the tree drank deeply.

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Love as a secret,

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Unbearable map.

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Tell me, verdad,

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Where have you laid the body,

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And I will bear him away,

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I will bear him away,

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I will bear him away.

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