The refugee’s run
across the desert borderlands
carved wings of fright
into his forehead,
growing more crooked
with every eviction notice
in this waterfront city of the north.
He sat in the office for the poor,
daughter burrowed asleep
on one shoulder,
and spoke to the lawyer
with a voice trained obedient
in the darkness of church confessionals
and police barracks, Guatemalan dusk.
The lawyer nodded through papers,
glancing up only when the girl awoke
to spout white vomit on the floor
and her father’s shirt.
“Mi vida”: My life, he said,
then said again, as he bundled her
to the toilet.
This was how the lawyer,
who, like the fortune-teller,
had a bookshelf of prophecy
but a cabinet empty of cures,
found himself
kneeling on the floor
with a paper towel.
Sathya's Personal Anthology 