The Blind Madre

In the alleyways of the barrio, families who once breathed
El Altiplano’s mountain air now divide themselves into blocks
of corrugated steel and inhale the sulfur and methane that oozes
from the Guatemala City dump. They left hoes and shovels
on the plateaus of Quezaltenango to squat—tenants without land,
farmers without fields—on decades of stratified waste.

The names of the barrio sectors imply promise—
La Libertad, La Paz, La Esperanza—
but reality is a soiled mattress in La Esperanza,
where blind Petronilla draws her eight children to her side
and waits in darkness for the husband who will, one more time,
pummel her body until the stain of a thousand pomegranates
spreads beneath her paper-thin skin.
Afterward, the man of the house will snarl
at Juan Carlos, Silvia, Luis, Edgar, Jesus,
Santiago, Gladys and little Petronilla, as,
one by one,
they drop curtains across the wells of their dark brown eyes.