There is blood in the landscape.
This is part of the story that only I can tell.
Include the burning house, hiding in the cornfields, the Testigos de Jehovah.
The “I” of me is insatiable, ready to cover thousands of years and kilometres.
Ready to pound questions into arepas, glistening palms.
Where they become something the north american in me can’t ask, only eat.
How abstract, those army-edged dreams, made familiar by what’s missing.
The “us” of me needs a discourse of potential.
Beyond the threats, the threads.
I was there when God tapped my grandmother’s shoulder and said: run.
I saw the way the land swallowed the bodies of the unlucky.
She was wearing her cutest shoes, the ones with the bows and heels.
Thank god.
When she left, her bare-breasted goddess turned to stone, moon-faced, porous.
Over two million Colombians were displaced during La Violencia (Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad de Colombia).
The battles have ceased, but the violence remains. (Etel Adnan)
When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins.
When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends. (Vanessa Vaselka)
But I am a clever girl, and I have an inward engine.
So I don’t step onto the road.
I move via satellite image, stitch my maps with offerings.
Memory is still being formed; the yolk hasn’t set.
My hybrid methodology and its belief: we can mend this.
Put your bags away, stay your shaking hand, try a new needle.
What does blood conduct?
