ca. 1530–1611
If a man is capable of
massacre or overseeing
massacre, which is
the same, does this also
make him capable
of killing his own wife?
Put another way,
if a man can seize
a sword and stab his wife to
death on learning she’d taken
a lover during one of his imperial
incursions into the sierra, massacring or
overseeing massacre,
which is the same,
disseminating smallpox,
brandishing
Catholicism, lashing the speakers
of languages spoken in the
lands he’d resolved to possess
in the name of the Spanish
crown, well, fuck
the hypotheticals,
because he did it, all
of it, and it’s his name
I know, not his wife’s or anyone else’s
he massacred or raped
or ordered massacred or raped or
the children they
birthed or their children who
continued to birth, over time, so
many children that they were
branded a nation
and flung into diaspora and dust-settled down
into generations of children
of which I’m one,
because that’s
how
family
works.