ZOOM CALL WITH MY SPANISH TUTOR, CHICAGO TO PANAJACHEL, GUATEMALA, OCTOBER 2025

Photo by Brian Wegman on Unsplash

The door behind you is like a frame, Ximena            The wood carvings

             que bonita      Umbral you say          Something solid which borders

an emptiness               A turn of your laptop and there

is Lake Atitlán and I’ll just imagine the volcano (one of three?)

hidden behind the trees           I see via double umbral

            my portal to your portal and we talk about Dia de los Muertos        

how we all have the same color bones           The indigenous women

faces skull-painted existed as equals for a day          

Last night at the service there was a man, Ximena, who knelt

before the ofrenda ablaze with photographs and velas and    oh

the colors        He knelt just bone on stone    Earlier they’d read aloud

the names of the detained and deported         Eleven of them

in their parish alone    so yes, he knelt         se arrodilló          Ximena, I cannot

kneel for so long         And sabes que when the priest

prayed over the bread and wine, a bird, though my son says a bat, but I think

a bird, flew above us fast and wild     it flew through incense hanging

high in the nave          etched a course east to west, north to south  

A sign of the cross but            unhinged         or ecstatic?      Or trapped.     

Someone whispered the Holy Spirit   Maybe    Un alma?    Puede ser                   

The veil was indeed thinner, como me dijiste             The winged creature

had to have flown over some kind of         yes         that’s the word: threshold        

Umbral            There were eleven names read, Ximena         Eleven

desaparecidos        Yet the man who’d knelt

could still take my hand         say paz de Dios.