What She Could Carry February 25, 2015 By Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes Matter: A (somewhat) monthly journal (October 30, 2014) This poem evokes the forced disappearance and displacement in contemporary Colombia. It all fit in her arms and the basket that hung from the handlebars, a rusted castoff whose creaking spokes clamored for the voices of a scarce tomorrow after years beneath the Plantain tree, equatorial torrents, and open-sky sun. Her infant child, strapped to her back; some yucca, avocado, and coffee grinds wrapped in the rapidity of alarm; her mother’s portrait; and a book of poems she hoped she could someday learn to read, that her husband regardless brought her, wrapped in ribbon from the city, on the day he first kissed her on the same riverbank to which he’d gone to fish only to be eight months late for supper. Rumors slapped her cheek for weeks that he’d been taken to an unmarked grave and handed a shovel but there was no word otherwise, despite her dawn-break pleas perforating the hours up through starless night wondering that drained her breasts of their certainty and left a bitter taste on her child’s tongue. She rides the velocity of violence peddling the dirt road to some semblance of safe after gunshots deafened the sugarcane, untaming death and its havoc, and the neighbor’s cattle came running, unsettled, aflame: the fabric of fecund days, deracinated. Erosions of history tattoo themselves into her skin, numbing erasure, a cruel wind knotting her hair, and the splintered tires traverse under the weight of infant, poetry, and dread toward a cosmopolitan horizon where the extermination of home and birdsong rises from the blistering pavement. *This poem references the violence of enforced disappearance and forced displacement that is rampant in Colombia. Colombia has over 50,000 reported disappearances, and about 5 million internally displaced. The Colombian military and its contingent, state-sanctioned, illegal armed groups are responsible for roughly 85% of human rights violations, including these. Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a queer, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, writer, scholar, artist, and activist. Her poetry has been seen or is forthcoming in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Kudzu House Review, As/Us, Feminist Studies Journal, Nepantla, Yellow Medicine Review, Write Bloody’s ‘We Will Be Shelter’, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn. -------------------------------------------------------------------- VIEW ONLINE: http://dev.portside.org/2015-02-25/what-she-could-carry-0 SUBSCRIBE: http://portside.org/subscribe VISIT PORTSIDE.ORG: http://portside.org TWITTER: https://twitter.com/portsideorg FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/Portside.PortsideLabor -------------------------------------------------------------------- Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: [log in to unmask] Submit via web: http://portside.org/submittous3 Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive ######################################################################## To unsubscribe, click the following link: &*TICKET_URL(portsidetest,SIGNOFF);