Poetry By Pablo Otavalo

Nicolas Bffd CC




Before We Were The Land's


My brother says You can’t eat poetry

as his worn boot presses the shovel’s edge 

into the dry earth. He digs out the stump

of an American oak whose roots are broad 

but shallow. Look at the birds in the trees, 

how they sing without worry. My brother 

sighs: he knows they are songs of hunger.

The last stay last, and the dead stay dead. 

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

under a silent god. Tomorrow in chains,

sold for a mark on your hand of a Cross 

and still, show up to work. The shovel’s edge,

the dry earth. We drown in different seas,

restless. His worries pour out like water.





Scorched Earth, Illinois

The town once hummed, pneumatic
hammers beat the slag out of iron, chimneys
billowed like chain-smokers mid-shift, dreaming
of somewhere else, where the sun set
the other way around, where their asthmatic 
children could breathe. And those were
the halcyon days. Now it's empty parking lots, 

boarded strip malls, and the Stop-n-Shop
with that giant wooden bird the high school built 
to commemorate the bicentennial. So when 
a bear sanctuary opened up on what used to be
a pig farm, some thought maybe it'll draw 
'em in off the highway. And every few weeks 

the bears would escape, and soon be spotted 
by the dumpsters of the Waffle House. It startled
people at first, but they got used to that too. And 
the bears never seemed to wander far, they 
just milled around town, never even headed 
for the woods. They would knock down a few 
garbage cans and just wait to be brought back 
to their pens. As though whatever was once wild

in them was gone. There was talk of changing 
the varsity mascot to the Grizzlies, but when 
the Millers' son went missing, they all had
the same fear. How foolish they had been, 
to trust a good thing. Then they found the body

under an overpass. Painkillers, the sheriff said. 
And Mrs. Miller stopped going to church. And talk
started up again about closing the sanctuary. 
And they started locking up the dumpsters. And 
Mr. Miller bought a rifle, because he loved his son. 

​


Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Structo Magazine, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and other publications. We must find what we revere in each other.



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