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By Erika L. Sánchez

According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project, 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.

They call it the corner of heaven:
a laboratory, a foot at the throat
of an empire. Before the holy
dirt, the woman with the feline gait
waits with tangled hair, mouth
agape — the letter X marked
on what’s left of her breasts
and face. Nuestra Belleza
Mexicana
. A roped mule
watches a man place a crown
on her severed head. Tomorrow
the queen will be picked clean
by the kindness of the sea.
Shuttered shops and empty
restaurants. Stray dogs couple
in a courtyard. Under a swaying
palm tree, a cluster of men
finger golden pistols, whisper,
aquí ni se paran las moscas.
Two boys, transfixed, watch
a pixelated video: a family fed
to a swarm of insatiable pigs.
A butcher sweeps blood
from an empty street. Death
is my godmother
, he repeats.
Death is a burnt mirror.
When the crackling stereo
dithers between stations — amor
de mis amores, sangre de mi alma
 — 
a gaggle of silent children
gather before a sputtering
trash bin. Together they watch
the terror hover like flies.


Source: Poetry (December 2015)

  • Living
  • Mythology & Folklore
  • Social Commentaries

Poet Bio

Erika L. Sánchez
Erika L. Sánchez is a CantoMundo fellow and winner of the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. Her nonfiction has been published in Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, the Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Salon, and many others. In 2015, Sánchez was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Chicago.  See More By This Poet

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