we sing it in the blood flowers and we sing it while they bury our sisters we sing it to the hungry rodents they cage us with
we sing and we sing and there are cannibalized families in the shithole
and the authoritative bodies dig and they say thank the lord we do not live in this shithole where the babies cry for their cages where the mothers have numerical codes stitched into their skin where the hole is overwhelmed by the shit and the shit is overwhelmed by the hole where the hired help helps the hiring hands to rehumanize the exiled bodies whom they shovel into the shittiest shit of the shithole
we are the moses and the aaron of the shithole and we sing this song of hope
we are the mannequins and the glass dolls of the shithole and we sing this song of hope
we are diseased bits of shithole earth on lizard corpses and when our children cry they tell us dig that shithole deeper
they say sing this song of hope and dig that shithole deeper we sing it to the dead who drink our dirty shithole water we sing it to the dead who sleep with the ghosts
in our hepatitis hole
in our meningitis hole
in the hole where they hide us like a debt that will never be paid
in the hole where they draw an intractable border through our broken shithole bodies
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Excerpted from The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 4: Latinext, a poetry anthology by Haymarket Books.
