From the selection of poetry curated by Eduardo C. Corral
We are here to talk, the Salvatruchas tell her.
Let’s go down to the dock and have a swim.
Sara’s eyes swing toward her mother’s,
who motions with her lips to take her younger sister along,
and so they walk in the slanting sunlight to the lakeside, splash
on the first two steps that descend into shadow.
A lone cloud hovers mid-lake. Chepe is upset
you don’t want to be his girl anymore, one of the mareras says.
Underwater, her sister sweeps a bare foot across Sara’s calf.
Yes, Sara replies, that’s why you’re here. The other marera claps
a hand on the little sister’s shoulder, MS-13 etched blue
across her knuckles, drops some bills into the sister’s palm
and sends her to the corner store for Cokes.
Heads down, shoulder to shoulder, a ring of mountains
around the slate waters of lake Coatepeque. Towers of cloud
stuff the mouth of sky.
When she stops thrashing
they wade out and walk up the dirt hill to the roadside
and make their way back. The sister returns to the rippled edge
and finds no one; their mother paces the shore past midnight,
flashlight in hand, finds her daughter’s rubber sandal in the sandy loam
that is only the tiny bodies of whorled snails.
At the day’s light, a spear fisher dives beneath the dock
and finds Sara’s body tangled among the reeds. Before this,
fifteen days of rain, like the years of her life, swallowed
docks, swelled mountainsides, unearthed boulders, felled
two hundred year-old conacastes. At the hilltop restaurants
where the panorama of lake splays out, people gather
on a Sunday night to wail Karaoke over soccer matches, or lean
into their lovers, while children fling their spinning toy tops
into a plastic tub, reds and blues dinging the sides, white streaks
whirling, warring to be the last one standing.
