MY FASCISM

by Elizabeth Rose

I could live in a fascist country.

I see that—now that I live in one.

It’s easy to be left alone

once you master a talent

for being quiet, maybe best

called silent. It’s easy

to turn off news

and just

listen for owl calls.

Easy to not see

when you only look

at trees and sunsets.

 

I’ve been practicing this

for a while now

and so far

my only problem

is looking in the mirror.

Elizabeth Rose, MFA, MS, LICSW,  is a psychotherapist, writer, and poetry therapist. She has published essays and opinion pieces in The Boston Globe, Anti-Heroin Chic,Valiant Scribes, Escape, and The Shanti Arts Review. You can find her poetry in BarBar, Verdad, and The New Verse News. She received her MFA in creative non-fiction from Lesley University in 2019. In addition to a psychotherapy practice, she offers “The Poetry of Gratitude: groups to enhance well-being through poetry and community” in Massachusetts.

STREETS OF BOUGAINVILLEA

by Elizabeth Rose

Since we started collecting data in 2012, 1,335 defenders across Latin America have lost their lives…. Yet very few families have seen justice for these killings. —Global Witness, September 2023

You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
           —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

 

I have my own Indian story.

Fausto, my friend, was also dead

 

by the roadside, macheted

in a waterless gully.

 

Stripped naked,

hanged, and cut through,

 

on a Sabbath.

His daughters asleep in cribs.

 

Fausto could have been

my child had I been born

 

on another continent

with another skin color.

 

We were both bent

toward social justice,

 

for me a conceptual brick

tossed through a window,

 

for him a sink

with running water.

 

His mother’s cavity eyes

his father’s taut mouth

stretched toward inevitability.

 

A cold case upon death.

A national miscarriage of laws.

 

Is this the sadness that kindles kindness?

Allows us to go out each day

 

into the streets of bougainvillea,

and ride the Tuk Tuk,

 

bodies next to baskets

overflowing with avocados

and mangoes.

Photo courtesy of the Otzin family.

Author’s note: This is the story of my friend Fausto Otzin. He was a lawyer in Guatemala. He worked on land rights cases representing indigenous people. He was an indigenous Katchakel himself. He worked in Guatemala City during the week and traveled back to Comalapa on the weekends where his wife and two baby girls lived with his parents, his younger sister and her son, and another brother, sister-in-law, and their three children. I was involved in building a school from rubbish in Comalapa for eighteen years and I became friends with the Otzin family during that time. In October 2009 he went out on a Friday night and didn't return. He was found in a gully hanged and stabbed thirteen times on the following Sunday. There was no investigation and now 14 years later there have been no arrests or even people of interest brought forward.

Elizabeth Rose is a poet and psychotherapist living in Massachusetts. She has previously published poetry in BarBar and Verdad. Her personal essays have appeared in the New Mexico Review, The Boston Globe, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She published a chapter in Escape, a memoir collection published in 2023 by the Pathfinders Collective. She received an MFA from Lesley University in 2019.