What an opportunity missed

could you have given them more life;

Was it their death / which moved plot to end

I think of your character Carmen

If she had been real

            she would have surrendered / summarily executed

bullets through the nape / 1990s calling card

Was it love for opera / fascination / which causes me to question

I want you to know / whenever I sit at a kitchen table

            I remember I was witness amidst brick stove

An aria of flame within a mansion / my city froze

            mantled by the garua— a drizzling net rendered time irrelevant I

became a sleepless child the night the embassy was taken—

glued to the tv with my nation.

Did you find host country / exotic / which causes me disgust

I was eleven when for one hundred twenty-six days

I watched

Japanese embassy household garden

            Unkept / filth / a plea / stormed

How long / being away from home / does it take

            to feel / exotic

Was it ghostship, your hand’s power to disappear bodies

Was the crisis truly operatic to your eyes

missing touch of music

Because the only sounds I remember

            bullets grazing / grenades go off/ hiss of smoke

As if they could swim out of the cathode box

Who the fuck would think of opera?

Repite conmigo, this happened in Perú.