DEAR SENATOR. BOLIVIA.

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

“Evo Morales’s Chaotic Departure Won’t Define His Legacy: History won’t remember him for the ongoing unrest, but for the enfranchisement of Bolivia’s indigenous population.” –Foreign Policy, November 22, 2019. Photo: A supporter of former Bolivian President Evo Morales stands in front of graffiti that reads "Long live Evo" during a protest in La Paz, Bolivia, on Nov. 14. GASTON BRITO MISEROCCH/GETTY IMAGES via Foreign Policy.

Dear Senator,

Did you ever hear of the valley where they found Che Guevara—
you were either in college or unborn when they corralled his band
in the valleys of tin in a country most boardroom men

Called Potosi

Bolivia

1967/2019

A land of riches governed by highland royalty who might have found
common cause with a Coca farmer from Cochabamba named Morales.

You have heard of him haven’t you, Senator? He’s in Mexico now.
Isn’t it a shame. What say you? Cocalero.
She and he and they see their compañeros y compañeras under the gun
of Uncle Sam’s war against an indigenous plant and the way of life its people
led because in the halls of Washington lucre flows in subsidy form to Big Pharma
and Law and Order.

What say you, Senator? Latin America. Has open veins and the president
at home is a tyrant but where are you when the indigenous working class see
their comrade presidente flee because the Americas are open for a certain kind
of business that will not obey the rights of Mother Nature who is a storyteller.

She’s a slam poet, Senator.

The rights of the forest. The breast of Mother Earth. The golden goose.
I’m sure there’s a hashtag for it. John Wayne fleeing the Indians riding
switchback across all of our constituencies.

Jeremy Nathan Marks is an American based in London, Ontario. Recent poetry, prose, and photography can and will be found in Literary Orphans, Writers Resist, Poets Reading The News, Unlikely Stories, Ottawa Arts Review, Bewildering Stories, 365 Tomorrows, The Courtship of Winds, Poetry Pacific, Eunoia Review, The Blue Nib, Stories of the Nature of Cities, and Lethe Magazine among others.

DEAD LAKE

by R. Nemo Hill 

LLAPALLAPANI, Bolivia — The water receded and the fish died. They surfaced by the tens of thousands, belly-up, and the stench drifted in the air for weeks. The birds that had fed on the fish had little choice but to abandon Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second-largest but now just a dry, salty expanse. Many of the Uru-Murato people, who had lived off its waters for generations, left as well, joining a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change. “The lake was our mother and our father,” said Adrián Quispe, one of five brothers who were working as fishermen and raising families here in Llapallapani. “Without this lake, where do we go?” —“Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity,” The New York Times, July 7, 2016

Take from the albatross all air,
from the worm the lived loam.
On dust farms, on salt flats,
on what used to be the shore
of all that made a here of there,
leave the wingspread, the blindcurve,
leave one liftless, one unburrowed.
“I am living in someone else’s home.”

Drain all that was from all that is,
forget remembering.
Forget to float.
The past is this shrunken husk of a boat,
a souvenir woven from straw,
an orphan for sale in the marketplace.
The future’s this salt we grind and gather.
“The lake was our mother and our father.”

Take all the waters taught of tilt,
take lilt, take lap and swell and spill.
Take from the wave all that wets—
then time will harden as it crests,
our season stilled.
We could not wake one small swift fish from its stench,
or raise one bright flamingo feather from its fossil.
“We threw out our nets, there was nothing for us.”

R. Nemo Hill is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a poem based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012 ) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016).  He is editor & publisher of Exot Books.