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Wendy Shaffer

THE HUMAN FAMILY with Prozac you get a prozac body a prozac heart and a prozac soul it fixes everything you can be sitting on your father's bed in guatemala while his wife describes her former husband at the gas station kidnapped by men in black leather jackets as her eight year old son is held back by someone in the government

she tells in spanish how they kept him three days before they dumped his body some word that's like a blade a bayonet that they used on his guts your father does not translate exactly your friend who doesn't know spanish is sitting beside you experiencing the story in her body and your prozac mind thinks this is what they do in these countries

you can leave this truth back there in the bedroom in the nice guatemalan casa surrounded by walled-in shacks, courtyards of dirt and rooting roosters your prozac flat-stomached body on a plane through the clouds all the native handicrafts in your bag the expensive camera pointed out the window and when you think back on the story of her son freaking out when a teacher entered his classroom wearing a black leather jacket what you would do with it if you moved to guatemala and you may not feel the truth of this other world until you give yourself back to yourself with all the torpor, the hesitation and the blues, your natural angry bloated body, your dreams unaided by prozac, as you wake before dawn a disturbance in your soul

the picture of your stepmother's first husband grabbed by men in black leather jackets in the gas station you walked past one afternoon the image of eight year old luis alfredo held back as his father disappears into a car the thought of three days' torture his body sliced into like an experiment -- how to extract words from flesh -- her husband's body found naked and mutilated dead a life of fear as she waited for them to kill the rest of her family without prozac you may wake before dawn a disturbance in your soul and know that you are part of this human family

** SEPIA NIGHT In this comfortable chair I am weightless in the brass tock of my nine o’clock night a moonbeam man sings kahlua chords from my silver radio pouring sepia light my hands muffed into the cat’s pleasured fur his hot dead weight on my legs he pulls me too quickly to sleep lulled deep in the waters by a boat engine purr I’m watching Wendy’s Guatemala photos; they are windows on my piano. In Guatemala, roads float mountains doors open clouds and a handsome woman cracks her eyes under her toweled head, men are matchstick profiles in the desert some swallowed in heat burn haze and their trucks are careless chucked black ants by the mirage or is it water this is real more than this room, more than this drowsy purring sepia night. Kathy Walker

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