Guerra Sucia (The Dirty War)
What is a gun without bullets? Just another blank stare
and a room full of war orphans, hungry and cold.
I drew vulvas in red chalk and removed all my clothes.
There were ways to make the soldiers feed
the children. I traded pleasures for rice
and milk, and in the end, the children
flourished like wildflowers in a field intended
for corpses. The colonel liked to watch me
feed mangoes to his green parrot with the yellow nape
because I was not intimidated by its large beak.
Sometimes when I fed the parrot from my open mouth,
the colonel ejaculated against my skin, explaining how
a bird only exposes its throat to those it trusts not to kill it.
At night, he buried his head between my legs and said
my body tasted of mangoes and the sea. He did not
recognize the taste of bullets or chalk, had perhaps
never known the taste of a child's hunger or the flowering
persistence of a woman intent on a plan.
Years later, vacationing on the coast with my husband,
I heard that the parrot had gone berserk
and severed the colonel's tongue. I was not sorry.
