Another Dirty War, by Margo Davis

Telerana ll, by Juan Carlos Distefano (Argentina) 1974. Photograph by Margo Davis (USA) 2015.

    
Another Dirty War                      
     
When I look at cellophane across this man’s 
bloodied mouth, nose, his grimace shrink-wrapped--
I can’t breathe. How had it come to this? 
 
What a price for speaking out. What woe 
surely we will never know. Breathe. A Dirty War, 
the people whispered openly. A life sentence 
 
repression choke-holding. But suffocate 
another? Stab them? A spider web, yes. 
In the late-seventies Argentine opponents

lost their children— innocents scooped up
for adoption by a country’s barren nobility. 
Where were you when it ended, in ’83?
 
My baby, just two then. I feel undone. 
Inhale. What could I have done? Thirty-plus 
years taken from mothers, widows. Never 
 
again. A dirty era long ago. A time so 
foreign. We speak out, speak up, speak loud.
Breathe a sigh. This cannot happen now. 

Margo Davis

Twice nominated for a Pushcart, Margo’s  poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Ocotillo Review, What Rough Beast, The Fourth River, The Houston Chronicle and Slipstream. Recent anthology publications include Enchantment of the Ordinary and Echoes of the Cordillera.