William Archila lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife. He  
earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems  
have been published in The Georgia Review, AGNl, Poetry  
International, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab  
Orchard Review, Obsidian III, Rattle, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily,  
Portland Review and Blue Mesa Review among others. His poems also  
will be appearing in Luvina Literary Magazine and Eclipse. He has  
been awarded the Alan Collins Scholarship at the Bread Loaf  
Writers’ Conference. He has also received a nomination for a  
Pushcart Prize in 2010. His first book The Art of Exile is the  
recent winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the  
Writer’s Center and the International Latino Book Award. The Art  
of Exile was also featured in “First Things First: The Fifth  
Annual Debut Poets Roundup” — the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Poets &  
Writers.

The decade the country became
known throughout the world

The ground cracked
like the rough pit of a peach
and snapped in two.
The sun behind the mountains
turned into an olive-green glow.
>
To niña Gloria this was home.
She continued to sell her bowl of lemons,
rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ
pocketed in her apron. Others
like Lito and Marvin played
soldiers in the ruins of a school,
running around mounds of bricks,
shooting chickens and pigs.
>
No one knows exactly how
a light film of ash appeared
on everyone’s eyelids
early in the morning
or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky,
twitched, leaped through the streets.
>
Some say the skin of trees
felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow.
Others believe the soapsuds
washed aside in rivers
began to rise in their milk.
>
One Monday morning, a rain fell
and the cemetery washed into the city.
Bones began to knock
and knock at our doors.
Streets became muddy rivers
waiting for bodies to drop
among piles of dead fish.
>
In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave.
>
This explains why women thought
and moved like lizards under stones,
why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls,
why dogs lost their sense of smell
sniffing piles of rubble to get back home.
>
In a few years, no one cared
about turtles banging their heads against rocks,
bulls with their sad, busted eyes,
parrots that kept diving into creeks,
the dark swelling of the open ground
or at night a knife
stained the kitchen cloth.
>
Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground,
the broom licking her feet at each stroke.
>
At the bus station, Marvin shined
military boots,
twenty-five cents a pair,
reduced his words to a spit, a splutter
of broken sentences
on shoe polish, leather.
>
In the evenings, he counted coins
he’d tossed in a jar,  then walked home,
one step closer to the cracked bone
clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.
>
>
published in The Gerogia Review

Credit: Poems are from Metropolis Burning,  Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2005.

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