"Baby Brianna was five months old when she died...she had multiple broken bones. Over thirty bite marks. She was beat to death..." "Susannah Martinez (campaign ad)
Doe eyed ghosts
Y los ninos mi corazon
Mall haired mamacita with the lined lips
505 madonna meant nothing to you
Bust that cap while she sleeps
Represent
And leave the little ones behind
Curled up against her cooling breast
Black blood and coffee grounds under their nails
It took them weeks to starve to death
Abuelitas they lament
Light the candles in Torreon
Would you buckle under the weight of tiny bones
Small hands that clutch the sky
Sightless eyes
Fragments of a smile stopped by a single shot
Gangstas gunning the wrong house
Little girl lost in poppi's arms
would her whispered breath against your neck
bring one tear
Baby Bartholemew in his car seat
choking to death in his own blood
Head lolling back crying for mommy
One last time
The sound...the stench forever resonant
Cuz teddy bears cant stop a bullet can they
Wrong place
Wrong time
Hand the grieving parents a tissue
And straighten her hair
For the cameras
This indignation will rise
Bile in your throat
for the next 40 minutes
Until you return to the blur
Of your regularly scheduled lives
We're so casual with our offspring
But Brianna, Bartholomew
and the ghosts in Torreon
they haunt these tears I cry
"It took us three years, but we fought to make it a death sentence. Baby Brianna's picture still hangs in my office." Susannah Martinez (campaign ad)
I will not forget....
TL Boehm
December 2010
This is a rewrite of a poem I lost - written about a culture that used to strap the murdered to a murderer until the murdered corpse dropped off. That was the punishment.
The Torreon cabin murders are true. Gangsters decided to **** a mother and her boyfriend in a cabin in Torreon and left her toddlers to starve to death. They ate coffee grounds before they died.
Bartholomew is also true. A drive by shooting....wrong car.
The little girl shot in the face, also true. Wrong house.
Governor Susannah Martinez and Baby Brianna Lopez. Yup. True.
It makes me physically sick.
you can google "Torreon Cabin Murders" as well as "Baby Brianna Lopez" - I cannot bring the pictures here. Only the words of my heart. Ask me now why - I am perpetually dark.