Oaxaca

Somewhere right now in Oaxaca, men with ski masks and assault rifles are dragging a woman out to a pick up truck and raping beating her before throwing her into the back of a truck . . .Her only crime was her refusal to be silent about her brother's murder . . this time tommorow guards will be torturing her in a cell in the women's federal prison in Nayarit on the other side of the country. The prisons of Nayarit are Mexico's Guantanamo, black holes from which no messages escape . . .

Riot police in full body armor stand alongside tanks blocking the roadways that go into the Zocalo, the city's historic center . . .

But a few blocks away a street kid in a torn t-shirt with a can of spray paint scrawls messages of liberation on walls freshly painted over earlier today and slips into the night before the patrols return.

The Zapotec legends say that when the people have faced great threats in the past the stones have hidden them . . . and when the time was right they slipped back from underneath the stones wearing the bodies of animals . . .

Friday, still in Oaxaca, I wrote this poem:

The daughters
of the 13th moon
lie battered
in the women's prison
in Nayarit.

As their blood
seeps into the floor,
the stones come alive,
spreading over scarred backs,
molding to them . .

turtle women
walk south
through gates
and checkpoints
unseen

until they come
into the Zocalo
and their shells fall away

becoming cauldrons
boiling water
for the mountains
giving birth
to the sun.