Leo Boix

A Latin American Sonnet LXVII

In the new drama film Sin Señas Particulares,

a whirlwind of violence in contemporary Mexico
translated into English as Identifying Features,
a mother searches for a lost son that has gone
to the other side of the border, or so she thinks.
The mother soon finds herself fully entangled
in an expansive crime syndicate and a labyrinth
of lies on a journey for the truth to be uncovered.
But the striking thing is how scenery, local Nature
plays a part in the drama, how the young director
reimagines a culture adrift, and also a thin border
where death comes back like a maddening spectre.
The Devil is very much alive in the Mexican desert,
you see him by a pyre, his tail whirling in the dirt.

A Latin American Sonnet LVIII

Late in 1981, on a bus from Buenos Aires to São Paulo,

the gay activist Néstor Perlongher writes a long poem
about the Argentine dictatorship, “Corpses”—a slow
decaying string of slaughtered bodies. Junta’s omen.
The rotting memories of death, a myriad of places
touched by political violence. An endless journey
through the Serra Geral range, the Araucaria forests
in the cool of the night and also in the early morning.
He crosses the wide Uruguay river, the Iberá morass,
keeps writing all day long, like in a Neobaroque frenzy,
he thinks of torsos, the profanity of sensual sordidness,
of the well hidden bodies falling into a turbid sea.
The feverish poem grows, its dark polyvocal sources,
and a recurrent refrain: There’re corpses. There’re corpses.

A Latin American Sonnet CXI

A newly erected statue of a grinning red man

appeared in an archaeological hotspot in Perú,
the crimson fibreglass as if a sun-tanned Tarzan,
almost identical to a Mochica vessel people knew.
Outside Trujillo everyone talked about the effigy,
the way it showed its raised fist to denote strength,
a rebellious salute, some said of amerindian solidarity,
how it sat on an Inca stool, so proud and so content.
Yet what really made the stunned onlookers gossip
was the fact that the man had an enormous phallus
 Leo Boix
as big as a large trunk, or a tall chimney propped up
by its scarlet right hand like a gargantuan chalice.
But despite its majestic appearance, its historic fidelity,
some vandals attacked the big red idol of fertility.

A Latin American Sonnet CXXVIII

Reading The Twilight Zone by Chilean Nona Fernández

about a moustached member of the secret police in Chile
who walks into the office of a dissident magazine and says
to a reporter he wants to tell a story, to give his testimony.
‘The man who tortured people’ takes the female journalist
on a strange journey, to the underworld of Pinochet’s years,
to the sinister places where young people ceased to exist,
dumped into rivers, a desert or the sea. They disappeared,
entered into that strange twilight zone, like in the TV series,
where you can stop time or change identities or travel back
to see faces history can’t reach. These rare portal theories
to reimagine the dark past of a country, memories in black.
Beyond the known world there is always another dimension,
(a voice over) sometimes you cross it, and then you’re gone.

A Latin American Sonnet CXXX

: The portion of the Americas where languages derived from Latin

are predominantly spoken. Places once ruled under the Spanish,
Portuguese and French empires. Parts of the US, like Manhattan,
where Romance languages are often spoken, and English vanishes
faster. A term broader than Hispanic America or Ibero America,
first used in 1856 by a Chilean politician called Francisco Bilbao
in a well attended conference just titled “Iniciativa de la América:
Idea de un Gran Congreso Federal de las Repúblicas”, really though
popularised by Napoleon III’s government as Amerique latine.
Consisting of 20 countries and 14 dependent territories, an area
that stretches from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, one that lets in
much of the Caribbean. The long Andes range, its main arteria.
The Incas thought Viracocha* created all things with magic chemicals,
including man, all animals, the rivers, lakes, the whole of Sudamérica.

*Creator deity originally worshiped by the pre-Inca inhabitants of Peru and later assimilated into the Inca pantheon. He
was believed to have created the sun and moon on Lake Titicaca.

A Latin American Sonnet CCXI

 Leo Boix
In 1590, the worst plague of smallpox in South American history struck,
it interrupted the Jesuits teaching. All the priests withdrew to the west,
down to the Ipané river to Paraguay, where they prayed for a better luck,
for a return to the good days of conversions at Pope Gregory’s request.
But despair set in. Converting the Indians of Guaíra, a hopeless cause.
All the Jesuits from Paraguay were duly summoned to a crisis meeting
in the north of Argentina. There was no future for their saintly exercise.
And according to the Jesuit Provincial, a father called Paéz, the teaching
had to be abandoned. It was too risky for the lives of the holy reverends
from the religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola, for “he who desires
to serve as a strong soldier of God, to strive especially for the sole defence
of the faith, and for the progress of souls in Christian life and its thesis”.
It was not a facile decision, father Paéz tells us, since “the Jesuits had left
behind two hundred thousand Indians, all ripe for the kingdom of Christ”.