Olga Garcia sent us this reader poem, drawn from multiple prompts.
Forced Evacuations
The headlines read “Record Setting Balloonist Touch Down in Mexico”
Hot air to fill the sky but not the void of so many disappeared,
nation of floating phantoms, 100,000 balloons rising, setting records.
Among them, 43.
It was the police.
The judges.
Boy Scout Politicians.
Drug lords.
Washington’s visionaries.
This is how we lose…Mexico’s students
are now officially “The Disappeared.”
Like those taken during Pinochet.
Like victims of Argentina’s Dirty War.
Like the Women of Juarez
and Nigeria’s 200 school girls—gone, gone, gone.
Where do the disappeared go?
In clandestine graves
they keep digging up feet, hands, charred remains.
There are pulverized teeth being examined in forensic labs,
and in a town called Iguala, they peeled off the face
and gouged the eyes of Julio Cesar Mondragon.
Dying
shouldn’t
be
so
brutal.
dis•articulations 2015 