ALL PARENTS WANT THEIR KIDS' DREAMS TO COME TRUE

by Tamara Kreutz

Foto Prensa Libre, July 17, 2022: Elmer Vargas

I.

Last Sunday at breakfast in San Martín, 

a Guatemalan bakery chain, my husband and I 

sipped our coffee and tea, as our three children 

raced up and down the indoor jungle gym.

While watching them, we thumbed through the paper. 

This story’s fucking awful, my husband said. 

The body of Juan Wilmer Tulul Tepaz, 

a fourteen-year-old Guatemalan boy who died (trapped 

in an abandoned truck in summer San Antonio heat)

was returned home to a village outside Sololá. 

The story showed pictures of his parents. The father’s 

hand covered weeping eyes as he sank into himself—

back bowed, arms pressing a crease in his middle.

The mother’s brow was squeezed into the shape

of a moth’s wings spread across her forehead.

She wore a purple huipil and a black bandana, 

and her hand caressed her son’s casket—the tips 

of her manicured fingers pressing into the wood, 

her thumb stroking the edge as she would her son’s cheek.

II.

My family just moved to Guatemala

to give our kids the life America 

couldn’t. Its dream had chewed us up, leaving the gnawed 

gristle of debt and burnout—the cost of gas

and rent and medical care. But in Guatemala, 

opportunity would unfold like a rug 

before our children’s feet—piano, dance, 

and horseback riding lessons—because the dollar

goes so much further here. In Guatemala,

I can pay someone to clean my house and watch my kids,

and if we’re sick and need labs, I won’t worry

the bills will hollow out our savings account. 

Our first day here, my toddler son locked himself 

into a second-story bedroom with an open 

window. He screamed for fifteen minutes, then went silent. 

I panicked, pounded the door, then raced out the house

and up and down the street, asking everyone 

I saw if they had tools to pick a lock—

until someone called the fire department.

Back in the house, I kicked the door, I paced, doubled

over, hunching in circles around the family room,

crying, I just want my baby back, now.

When the locksmith came with wires and screwdrivers

to take the doorknob off, and I finally burst through

to find my son sound asleep in bed, I pulled

his little body to my chest. He woke,

startled, but nestled his silky head under my chin,

and I felt his heart beat against mine. In the nine years 

I’ve been a mother, this was the first time

I couldn’t reach my child who needed me.

III.

I keep thinking about how I felt, locked away

from my son, wondering if he was hurt or even—

(I can’t bring myself to write it, I’ll leave the word 

unsaid). And I keep thinking about Juan Wilmer— 

the ten thousand dollars his parents paid 

the coyote for safe transport, his dream 

of education, the pictures of him alive 

and smiling placed on the family altar.

I keep thinking about his mother’s hand

that clutched his casket, her fingers spreading 

over its edge—exactly how my hand

had clutched the arm of my live and dreaming child.

Tamara Kreutz is an English Language Arts teacher and a poet who resides in Antigua, Guatemala. She began writing poetry early in the pandemic, and through poetry, she found order, peace, and joy in a turbulent, uncertain time.

THE STUMBLING BLOCK

by Tamara Kreutz

Advocates for abuse victims at a rally outside the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas in 2018. Credit: Jeffrey Mcwhorter/Associated Press via The New York Times.

For the victims of the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse coverup, whose stories were hidden, twisted, and heaped with shame to protect spiritual leaders of the SBC as well as to the victim of Pastor John Lowe II, of New Life Christian Church, whose abuse was cast as adultery.

“Then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was beautiful to behold.” II Samuel 11:2

Religious tradition placed Bathsheba on her roof

performing a striptease for the king—a bullseye 

view of her naked body on display: breasts dripping 

in nectar, smooth curve of her hips that glistened

like jewels, and her pubic hair—a lily between her legs.

Tradition imagines her hands sliding over her wet 

body—washing and touching and rubbing.

It says her beauty brought low God’s anointed 

one. Pastors brand her a stumbling block—

but David cast her from his bed,

his semen trickling out of her like blood.

I imagine she stood, her head bowed, her arms 

embracing her own ravaged body for comfort,

as she shuffled back home and closed her shutters

to shut out the king’s hidden gaze.

I imagine her crouched in the darkness, washing

and washing and rubbing away memory of David’s

hands on her breasts, his mouth on her belly—

memory of him between her legs—but his touch

was branded on her skin, as much a part of her future 

as the seed he planted in her womb. No one calls their child

Bathsheba, a name dripping with shame, though David’s 

namesakes number the stars. She is remembered

as temptress but he as a man after God’s own heart.

Tamara Kreutz is an English Language Arts teacher and a poet who currently resides in Illinois, though she will soon move to Antigua, Guatemala. She began writing poetry early in the pandemic, and through poetry, she found order, peace, and joy in a turbulent, uncertain time.