after embroideries by the women of the CPR-Sierra from the Civil War in Guatemala
Here again women thread their stories:
of men arriving where men are disappeared
where even a dog’s left speechless but for a thin red drool
chasing a cat still under a tree’s thick green leaves,
stitched chickens lay flattened over their eggs
and a giant purple flower with a pink center sprouts
a sun on a stalk pressed to cloth—in stunned
silence they washed, washed and combed and spun thick
raw wool; in their mouths pause the needles they pull,
lo deje quebrada quemada
nuestro machetes;
how bright children’s blood tendered by the hands
of others, the dead mothers sutured to their cornfields
among skins and stalks stripped and split. The women’s
stifled screams—their cortas cast over their faces before
the soldiers’ slashes uprooted their tongues, their breasts
stained scarlet, yarn from their heartwood-soaked skeins.
