a serious surplus population that needs eliminating

‍

So now we are equals, verdad? All along eyeing the same banks,
as though we might surface on the same shore, bare backs
to the sun, wet shirts in hand, boots aside, those too.
You keep saying, El otro lado. See you there,
face to face, no worries.
                                        The last good lynching
was long ago. Ropes, belts, canteens sway in the tree. The tree
sings with lightness. In time, the fruit shrank in the heat, grinned
wide from the bone, dropped to the dirt.
                                                                 Rot. The earthworm’s
heart, this now. A knot, a fishing spot.
The sweet-blood smell of the hook right through, the impaled
form, right through, either soft end writhing on the line.
Beneath the surface, neither vertebral nor articulate, it sways
under water—guts in skin—it sways from the other side, verdad,
not a lure but a rumor, a mirror, of a parallel end;

                    we’d fished the shallows with stripped willows,
                    with a hellgrammite drifting in the current,
                    and that’s where we trapped our leviathan,
                    iridescent scales that slid away from our hands,
                    where we crossed the swinging bridge and found
                    effigy and sign, Death to scabs crossing the line,
                    a volleyball head and a pair of shovels for limbs,
                    the hanging white sheet, the slashed body of many:
‍
                    the hanging white sheet, the slashed body of many:
                    a volleyball head and a pair of shovels for limbs,
                    effigy and sign, Death to scabs crossing the line,
                    where we crossed the swinging bridge and found
                    iridescent scales that slid away from our hands,
                    and that’s where we trapped our leviathan,
                    with a hellgrammite drifting in the current,
                    we’d fished the shallows with stripped willows

y verdad, the cities on either side of the river watch
one another from the eyes of their televisions.
Their headlines race beneath glass

—they have taken my father’s body
and I do not know where they have laid him—

and light. Love as the sinker, the line sinking deep. The last time
I saw my father was in a dream, seated on every side of the table
of ancestors, and belonging so fully, he ceased to exist. They arrived
on the other side, at the tree at the end of this world, and the tree
drank deeply. Love as a secret, unbearable map. Tell me—verdad—
where you have laid the body (and

I will bear
him away. I
will bear him a-
way. I will bear
him a way).