History hurts. They told us back in the day don’t study history whatever you do. You’ll see a life misshapen, possibly murmured in a vast derangement of your own. You might see a doomed love or a cruel man. You might see a coward. You might see a life-gnawed man, like the one in my sewn-shut dreams. But you also might see the ones with pueblo skin on turquoise trails, sleeping in the bruise-dark dirt. We go to that place sometimes, Los Cerrillos. That’s where he was from. It goes like this: lightning, in the wailing stretch of night, bright white. Starved wide, history hurting to the bone.
a college-wide literary competition
