Echoes - Volume 02

Pudú

I muddied my hooves

In the bamboo underbrush,

Eyes on the passiflora.

I wore down my dewclaws

Preserving the understory.

Worms string the oxbow,

Illusory solitude,

Tattletale coughs and heartache.

I’ll take dogs or gunshots.

Hunters leave compassion intact.

Vinicunca

If all the world’s a stage, then we are brash

To dance upon it; we are not

Who history came to see.

We are the children

Chittering in the aisles,

Embarrassing the vicuñas whose eyes are on the actors

And the queñuas whose roots are.

We’ve made our own play with kings and countries.

Onstage, the lead sheds his glacial dress in the stagelight’s glare,

Molting like a shuddering serpent.

We shut and look up:

El apu Vinicunca,

Orgullo del dios del arcoiris,

Luminoso y desnudado, bailando al ritmo tectónico.

Paciente, pacífico, su sudor brillando

De sus brazos en el calor abrasador.

Los niños lanzan flores que echan raíces

Y florecen al lado de sus pies ampollados.

Pishtaco

Doveblood floods the shallow river like the Hatun Mayu in May or like a sunrise

pooling in the sky and mantling in the silt-stained mirror. The Mother Tree,

Sach’amama, watched him plunge through the moonlit canopy, evergreen,

ever-sparser: migratory meteors alighting in the treetops, indigo eyes eager to

make them meteorites. Steel on snakeskin, the monster glides past her,

arquebus in tow. She knows how she seems — another tree felled where

nobody can hear. But trees propagate freely, and gold blooms but by observed

falls, by violence. She winds along the riverbank through charcoal plumage and

gilded primrose-willows till she finds the dead bird washed ashore. Sure enough,

the fuckers sucked the fat from his frame, insular down damp with cynical spit.

Tomorrow, sharp-nosed dogs will track the boot prints in the sand. Tonight, she

unlocks her muddy jaw and buries him.

Mixed Media & photography by Adriana Adame, Lucia Llano and Koral Nava

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