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.

SOUND AND FURY FROM UVALDE

by Suzette Bishop

I hear it from a two hours’ drive north,

From just below the scenic Texas Hill Country,

The scream of first getting the news

Their loved one was gunned down

Merged into one long, piercing, repeating sound,

Before a storm barrels southward,

Hail starting up slowly,

Then shaking the cathedral ceiling,

Our windows,

Animals running for cover.

We’ve driven through the small town,

Stopped to get gas,

Know a couple people who went to the junior college

On barrel racing scholarships,

Heard the grandson of someone from work survived.

A heart-stopped moment in class once

With the popping sound down the hall,

Two students, a veteran and FBI agent, meeting my eyes,

The veteran immediately slamming the door shut.

He always sat next to the door,

One leg jiggling, ready to escape.

Do you know what to do if there’s a shooter?

The agent asked me, asked the class.

Everybody nodded. 

The lectern and desks our only hope

Of keeping that door closed since there is no lock,

And I’m not given the key,

I am forced to tell them.

That time, it was just some backfiring or mechanical sound,

And we got back to what we were supposed to be doing,

Our hearts re-starting,

Still, I see us rocking the lectern from its moorings,

Pulling up the tape covering the wires to the computer,

Pushing and dragging it to the door,

The wires sparking, desks piled around it,

Some of us smashing desks into windows.

In one scenario, we get this done before

The shooter appears at our classroom on the second floor,

In some scenarios, the students jump two stories down,

Breaking bones, cut by glass, but alive,

In another scenario, the shooter enters at our end of the building

And sprints up the stairs, bypassing the first floor;

The veteran, some of his classmates

Sitting near him, try to keep the shooter out

By leaning hard against the door, but can’t,

The agent pulls out his concealed gun and shoots most times.

In many scenarios, the lectern is too heavy,

Too stuck, to move,

The desks too flimsy and small,

Their tabletop hinges squeaking loudly,

Drawing attend, wasting precious time.

In a few scenarios, the shooter is one of my students,

Already in the classroom,

Like the one who lovingly wrote poems about his gun,

The one having a meltdown and yelling at me

During the final,

Another ranting so loudly, another instructor looked in on us,

The one writing about hurting a classmate,

The one who mailed me a threatening letter,

Whoever left a knife at the lectern.

With the sound of hail ringing like deadbolt locks,

I use the knife to cut the wires.

Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. In addition to teaching, she has given workshops for gifted children, senior citizens, writers on the US-Mexico border, at-risk youth, and for an afterschool arts program serving a rural Hispanic community. She lives with her husband and two cats.

LAME-DUCK LIMERICK

by Patricia Mosco Holloway

Drawing by Dominic Xavier at rediff.com, November 9, 2020.

A plan to remove the stout lout:

We let him rage on, threaten, pout.

     Still valid, our tally.

     Get him to a rally.

Then all we need do?  "Lock Him OUT!" 

Patricia Mosco Holloway is a writing teacher in Denver, Colorado. She has poems published in The New Verse News, Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, and Silver Edge.