The words crawl on the wall          no longer yours.

Lima has robbed them                   of their weight, your thought.

I open last night’s inherited carob pain,

dry pisco glass—taste the sand thirst-stretched

as the canvas of your hidden portrait.

From your ego,                  your vulture-flight life

desecrates my crystallized origin,

a paroxysm in the dream of our country,

or how I tried to dream it:            our stories, gathered fragments

every single one                a red spike

holding in place                             the house,

each one splaying us

through our father-fog, implacable in engulfing all.

Father,

When you asked for my love, it dissipated.

When you asked forgiveness, all I could say was no.

Missing the desert: incantation

unleashes your words.

You are obsessed with fog and sand, my son.

Undoubtedly, our strife was born before us.

How to explain the unhinged reckoning?

My memory’s birth is in night-terror.

As in Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries of the Inca:

the vanishing of a way the world once entered the body,

told in the language of the victor,

with bandages where no light enters.

The wound seeps

as we consider how heavy the noose weighs

the degree of colorism,

the beauty of the word cholo

Even here, in our cliff-filth city,

where we failed to exterminate one another,

where no one reads,

where I am the tourist,       not the internal visitors you

hate I cannot turn the page             my rescue failed

every stone I turn              reveals a scorpion I left behind.