Guayaberas

In my boyhood, all the men

wore them, a light body shirt
with pleats running down the breast,
two top pockets for pens, notepads,

two bottom ones for keys or loose change,
each sewn with a button

in the middle of the pouch,
a complement tailored to the slit
at the side of the hip. If you look

at photographs in family albums,
men stand against palm trees,

their short-sleeved guayaberas
caught in sunlight, their Panama hats
tipped to the sky. There’s a black and white

of my father, stumbling along fields
of cane, head full of rum,

mouth in an o, probably
singing a bolero of Old San Juan.
On days like these, the sun burned

like an onion in oil. Women hung
guayaberas on windows to dry.

Shirtless, men picked up their barefoot babies
off the floor, held them against their bellies
as if talking to a god. Even my school uniform

was a blue guayabera, but nothing
like my father’s favorite: white,
long-sleeved, above the left breast

a tiny pocket, perfectly slender for a cigar,
arabesque designs vertically stretched.

When the evening breeze lulled
from tree to tree, he serenaded

my mother, guitars and tongues of rum
below her balcony; the trio strumming,
plucking till one in the morning.



I don’t know what came first,
war or years of exile,
but everyone — shakers of maracas, cutters

of cane, rollers of tobacco — stopped wearing them,
hung them back in the closet, waiting

for their children to grow,
an arc of parrots to fly across the sky
at five in the evening. In another country,

fathers in their silver hair sit
on their porches, their sons, now men,

hold babies in the air, guayaberas nicely pressed.


published in Hanging Loose

Bury This Pig

Behind the cornfield, we scaled the mountainside
            looking for a foothold among the crags,

rooting out weeds, trampling on trash,
            the trek as if it were a holy crusade:

bodies armored, mounted on horses,
            banners fluttering in the air.

Then one morning, we stumbled upon the thing,
            dead, cramped in a ditch, covered in ants,

trotters grimy, a purple snout of flies
            and not a dollop of blood,

but a thick piece of hide, cradling
            about fifty pounds of hog.

Someone said, “Kush! Kush!”
            as if to awaken the thing.

I thought about the carcass, blood-slick,
            staggering into the room,

grumbling and drowning as if deep in the mud,
            eyes buckled in fear,

bones breaking down to the ground, open
            to the chop and tear of human hands:

pork and lard, forefeet, fatback cut into slabs,
an organ fattened and butchered.

It continued for weeks, a few of us
            meeting in the afternoons

just to look at the steaming belly, maggots
            stealing the gray of the brain,

each time, one more barefoot boy
            probing the eye socket with a stick.

Some of us came back armed
            with picks and bars, shovels dusty in our hands,

until the ground groaned with war.
            The sky fell and cracked the earth.

How was I to know
            they would be hooked, hacked,

snouts smashed on the wall,
            their bodies corkscrews on the floor?

How was I to know
            I would bury this pig, rock after rock?



 published in AGNI

© Copyright, William Archila.
All rights reserved.