“Ariel” — A poem about backpacking Guatemala
Written 8/23/25 after a season spent backpacking Guatemala
Note: Drafted on my ex-boyfriend’s birthday, a Dreamer. He paid for our third-date drinks with his Ecuadorian passport: 8 years old in the picture.
He married the next girl he dated—the clean-up woman—for certainty. I wonder if they’re still together.
He described his constant fear of discovery, deportation, in a Turkish place at a table next to women chattering Spanish. 15 years here.
When I asked him why his professor parents came here to clean houses and do the dirty work, his eyes blazed.
Opportunity. Golden lanes. The monotony of choicelessness.
“Ariel”
In an abogado’s home two miles from Guate’s oldest market, I hear, “200,000 indigenas are missing or dead.”
Over papaya and platanos, his generous lips kiss his 3,000-year-old nose, his thick mountain farmer’s fingers waving sad.
A wide, plumed profile portrait of kings reclined, a great lion’s defeat.
“After the war, the rebels made a political party but abandoned their ideology when they got rich.”
He named the country’s chaebol: crispy-fried drumsticks and bony alpine mules with rough-hewn logs: feeding lumber papis and Pollo Granjero smiling chicks!
When I return “home,” pockets leaking like a paper bag,
the military’s occupied the capital; unnatural-born citizens have fled or got trapped in a Kafka novel.
Blue-gray smoke settles over rows of fresh cemetery stones.
They’re arranged in a fractal: a never-ending infinitely detailed geometrically self-similar shape.
No matter how many times you resect it, the calculated existential pattern repeats.
Before I left, my things all fit in a box,
then a backpack—strapped for cash—rising like steam up Volcan Zunil conical slopes.
The landlord I hired smiled an eerie-eyed Christlike smile
“I’ve gone down there many times to save the people from burning. They need us.”
A week in, my hot water’s cold; he comes in to fix that too.
For a thousand monthly bones, the couple downstairs copulates on a timer; I shut my ears.
I buy my goods at the Dollar-Fifty Tree: same roots, new rings, year over year.
The plastic American playbook: conquer, rinse, repeat. 4-star Cambodia taught me the value of a dollar: riots keep the population fed.
Bleed Khmer Rouge cows for a desperation girl dinner.
My soul sings the body electric: “¡Uzpantan! ¡-pantan! ¡-pantan! ¡-pantan! ¡-pantan! ¡-pantan!” sings a boy’s body hanging out a chicken bus half full.
Daddy dictator
homegrown militant
slave dollars:
“pickemup! pickemup! pickemup!”
Guatemala the blueprint for Vietnam, the blueprint for Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru.
Fifty years later, sicarios in unmarked cars turn the summer to ICE
While the National Guard collects trash on the National Mall
And Venezuelan terrorist boats muddy prismatic waters with drugs.
Which way to even turn?
The rapid beep of a passenger van
head in the sand
rough-strewn like cobblestone
streets
rain-heavy holes to dig us deeper in
still.
And above all, call, call, call the powers that be
we see; we’ve seen them,
not here
but before;
lifetimes only made us forget.
The TV generation’s all glued to its phone: dysregulated, upset, still searching, so scared.
“You can’t start a revolution sitting six [inches] from your screen.”
But it is being televised.”
Dig deeper.
Fingernails break:
the strain of back-spasm labor.
My thick farmers’ hands the stock of Old-Country Jews
turning the stew of frijoles black, sweet sterile plantains, this human life.
Samsara’s calling.
Disappear me into Zoom, to mirrored rooms,
1972 Pinochet, to Chile, Uruguay, to Yucatan hablando en Ki’che, Historias Unknown.
Umami earth, coerce my fibers into dust, fish, fried humid air—what do I care?
In the morning, I wake, forget, and live this dream again.