We Were All Born Half-Dead

Poetry
Written By William Archila

We were all born half-dead in 1932, said Roque Dalton, half-alive.

Take a handful of corn & weigh it in your hand. Take a fist
into the mud & tear the potter’s clay. If this is not enough
heed the rooster’s crow, raise corvos, sticks & rocks, mark
your campesino shadows with fury on the palace walls.

Social discontent is Jose Feliciano Ama dangling on a ceiba tree.
To be indigenous is to be a communist. To drag a chief
or faceless thief as if it were a crime. As if they were gods to take
the land for indigo, the hills for coffee. This is the light of the sickle

which is black in the mind, which is red splattered over the papers.
Widows & their pious tongues affirmed the genocide of a language.
Invisibility is their mother tongue & she is sweet like Christianity.
They say we are the movements they left half alive. Illiterate insects.

The soul of a nostalgic bird we are. We take our axe, eat the earth.

William Archila

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Southern Indiana Review and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, and Poetry Northwest.

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