Pachamama

The flock of pan flutes, of the bases and the bombs,
  harmonize as the evil in the air grants us
rationed rights and inherited wrongs.
The way barbecued guinea pig wafts
upon the Andes wake, toughest of meat
met tougher defeat to Big Macs and Costco hot dogs.

We scrounge up mercy for Machu Picchu, thank god
  for the billionaire’s vacationing
and ayahuasca escapism.

Our women once embellished the mountainscape,
suckling granadilla, woven sacks of babies clinging
to their backs, led by llamas grazing
the perking greenery. Wild naivety of summer, unclothed
under the supple sun, hymning with splashes
of the Amazon.

I am no stranger to her cradle,
I tiptoed all the way, to the last pebble of the prophecies,
  watched the body parts and the last Quechua sparks
fall from the boulder’s brink. I know how to write
  better than I know to braid. Alphabetical brutality simmered
on my tongue, swelling it tender and numb
  with the prickles of domesticated scripture.

Chewed it up and swallowed proud, the sensibility of diaries,
  the preliterate quipus.
When our girls disappeared, fraternity flourished,
  claiming such savage, sensual defeat.
What an erotic exotic, how boho-chic!

  A silent auction, a black-market transaction,
for the value of an Indigenous woman is how quietly
  she can please. A scalp bounty or a frugal CEO, an island
with a gaping appetite for brown skin—

  a dead girl’s manifesto
buried beneath the manhandling of American dreams,
  honored among AI-generated land acknowledgments,
for your engineered devotion. Our sacrificial young
  in the name of rising stock prices, for LinkedIn accomplishments.

“Animals,” I heard them proclaim on the television last night. How
  could one be inhumane to the unhuman? Sending
the homegrown kin to immigrant detention, some to cages,
  some disappearing to a fourth dimension. Those Indian princesses
and their spicy, feisty Latina delight. Backyard conspiracy theorists say
  we were brought here by aliens, products of extra-terrestrial beings.

Their mystic woes, celestial vibrations twinkling code.
  Does brown skin shine green, under the moon? Did the sun beat
us scaly? Bodies, like mountains, will wear away at the hands
  that demand such labor, stolen and stuffed

across man-made borderlands. Steeple-speared, dollar-bound,
  craving-sick in the grasping of it all. The rise
of empire-forged hungers, the excavation
  of mercury-slick golds, of Andean girls. The condor’s fall.

Grief blows wild in the baby hairs caught between webs of lashes
  and lies, posters bleating “DISAPARECIDO” plaster the street lamps
across the continent, from the coca plants to the Yucatán to
  the star-spangled heartlands. Stolen daughters bleed pink the rivers—
my ancient sorrow flows, where their bodies tangle in the underbrush,
  only Pachamama knows.