At every town along its route
the caravan stops, and mothers from Mexico
unload their dead sons
and daughters to display.
Look at the wounds, they say.
As each one’s story is told
the body stands up for a moment
to show where the bullets went in.
All the while, the weapons makers make
more weapons to sell
on both sides of the border
and the market thrives
with both sides of the law
buying where the dollar
is traded for the peso
kill for kill.
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. The latest of his poetry collections is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press.
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