Central American History Lessons
If you can write
Your history
Without
The bodies… [redacted]
And their survivors
Whisper of generations
Disappeared
From their own soil
Foreign to you
Savage to you
Distant from you
The truth sanitized for you
In Kodachrome newsreels
Where you’re
The lead actor
In their oral tradition
Webs of truth
Spun
From ear to ear
Under the cover of night
Because
Central to this country’s
Intelligence is a smaller nation’s
Agency, impressionable, “anticommunist” in hope
To yet another administration
Training Mayans, “exotic,”
Under stateside Spanish Moss
Weaponizing villagers to scorch
Their own hillside
So mothers can slice bananas
Into their children’s eager breakfast bowls
You might be an American
Try Forgetting your Tongue
Antes escribía
Antes escribía poesía
Antes trazaba mi alma…
En busca, no de la rosa, sino de la buganvilia
The lick of your mother’s tongue
Orphaned for things your skin hasn’t done
Is like a child without a land
Like getting the back of your father’s hand
My ear tips towards the rolling
Ocean waves storming against my mouth’s roof
Hips sliding up hands, embraced
Thick as sound, thieves dancing between us
Michael Adam Carroll is a Guatemalan American writer living in San Antonio. He is an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Workshop and earned a PhD in Peninsular and Latin American Literatures from CU Boulder. His writing on immigration fiction has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Ploughsharesonline, The Believer (Logger), and The Millions, among others. His poetry has appeared in Fósforo.