Poem Series by William Archila

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Dear credible reader, dear believer, all the ample gratitude 

for being here & looking through this blue-cone volcano. 

I want to tell you about a refugee the bulk of a Duende 

who has become nothing but the cliche of a fragment.

I first heard the ruined narrative from crooked creed 

to crooked creek when I was ten, & have carried him since, 

a trickster hunched like a crow on my crooked shoulder. 

I need you to enjoy yourself & trust me when I say enjoy. 

Please consider leaving your academy of hats & coats 

by the door. Allusions are mine. My ethos here are none. 

If there is a moment of doubt in your bones consider

Cuzcatlán. All I know is he’s everywhere, pre-Columbian 

to colonial, 1932 to 19 nowhere, asking for so little, at least 

a minute minute, someone to remember, call out his name.

*

The manyfold drama found in flowers has kept me surfacing

beyond the wind-blown dandelion. No bee or wasp can avoid 

the significance in petals, just like I (and no one knows this 

more than I) can’t avoid the pathos in my mother’s version.

It all springs out of an affair. My mother’s charm or witch’s brew

backfired & now we’re condemned. I’m a bastard son out 

to the liquor store. An iguana in a noose hanging from a tree. 

These plot elements are the very cliche where I come from.

And now, since I have you here listening, let me tell you about

that ship of fools, God’s whinos & God’s hooligans. All they wanted 

was a reign of gold, gold in their rings, gold in their teeth, gold 

beneath their tongue, that yellow thing soaked in God’s echo.

If you must know, I’m a little like a fallen Cupid without the status, 

without a Valentine, which is to say, to love you is to destroy you.

*

After the emperor’s death, the sons of the sun descended 

through the clouds like a line of red ants. Heathens stuck 

in the mud is all they are. They are baroque. They are broke,

sloths sleeping their lives away, never fully awake. Iron & logs 

to build a raft, lord. Planks & some velvet to build a throne. 

They want the birds to drop dead from the trees. They want

the white sky like a lizard quietly gouging its own eyes. To them 

the land is only trees & water, cannibals & cruel sun. That’s why 

in their fever the arrow in their chest is not a weapon. The rain 

is not water. In the vines & tree tops they see a boat beneath 

your tongue, lord. They see a Spain. To retrace their steps 

is an expedition failed. To retrace their steps is to unload dirt 

in the graves. When they look to the ground the ghost in the machine 

is only wood smoke. When they sleep they dream alone. 

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Note: These untitled, quasi-sonnets are part of a series inspired, loosely based, and sometimes in the voice of the pre-Columbian myth of El Cipitio, a Salvadorean figure generally portrayed as a naked boy with a big straw hat, large belly, long ears, and deformed feet. He is the illegitimate son of a forbidden romance and has been sentenced by the gods to remain ten years old for the rest of his life. The legend has evolved from pre-Columbian times to the era of the conquistadors, from the peasant insurrection of 1932 to the civil war in the 80s, which initiated the Salvadorean diaspora, each time changing the narrative according to the historical upheavals and popular culture of country. El Cipitio may represent the social consciousness of El Salvador and to a certain extend the Northern Triangle. The sonnets included here arise out that epiphany between the Maya world and the Spanish Conquistadors.

William Archila’s The Gravedigger’s Archaeology won the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize and his first collection The Art of Exile won an International Latino Book Award. He was featured in Spotlight on Hispanic Writers, Library of Congress. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Agni, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, and The Missouri Review. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. 

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26 September 2022