By Amalia Danilo
Colombia
Heat was your country’s honeycomb
waiting for me, her grandchild, to succumb to slumber.
Slipping into my bloodstream
flooding the mind with the same haunting scene
that has followed me in every life:
Cloud-veiled mountains, emerald calico
smothered in humidity, the kind that suffocates.
A search-party of one, my swollen eyes scan
for the parts of you that were trafficked:
1.Resting heart rate
2.Sense of safety
3.Naivety
I can see a prisoner kneeling
in front of his captors
like Mary Magdalene
witnessing Christ.
Uprooted
from the motherland
from his mother
from his children.
It is too late
to wish that the intangibles
had been present in my upbringing.
Amalia Danilo is a poet based in the western coast of the U.S. and has been writing since she was a young student. Her work is forthcoming in Exponent II, The Bookends Review, and the SLCC Community Writing Center’s 2026 Community Publication.