Victim Poem by James Mullaney

With the feral grace of an Aztec priest I survey
The unsleeping barrio from this tenement-temple.
I count minutes, quarter-hours, half-hours,
Hours and hours. Jupiter will rise at 11: 37;
Saturn sets shortly thereafter.
Last night the storefront evangelist put a cross
fist through the astrologer's plate glass window.
The night before that my neighbor Luisa

was shot through the heart by Mara Salvatrucha
for testifying in federal court.
An honors student in life science
at La Guardia Community College, she was
to have been the soprano in a requiem for sea turtles
tonight, in a recital at P.S.1. They'll fly
the body back to Yucatan for burial
where for fifty centuries sage astronomers
keen and quiet as puma eminences
patiently plotted civilization's ceiling
until men in mountains floating on the sea

torched their archives and purged their superstitions.
I watch with golden rays in my eyes
as people place wreaths, candles, along the avenue.
Graffitists paint a hieroglyphic mural.
Surely Quetzalcoatl will not withhold the rain.