By Lucinda Bentley
My neighbors live at the edge of the River Rocha,
Only an open canal; chemical waste, raw sewage, old tires.
Their homes pop up and proliferate like toadstools after rain,
Disappear,
These houses of ripped sheet plastic, rags and banana leaves.
When we visit with donations one man with long white hair
Against dark sunburned wrinkles, asks for "soymilk, instead".
Four more are wiry adolescents, wild-faced glue-sniffers,
Dusty tousled hair, angry, jumpy eyes,
Too thin bodies still betraying their child-ness.
One keeps three sheep in the riverbed, hobbled, corralled,
With clinging driftwood. Traffic whines within yards, oblivious.
Every few weeks the police knock down or set afire
My neighbors' homes.
They scout the city's garbage bins for present food and future building
materials. They want squatters' rights to this land
Nobody else wants
And nobody else wants them to own.
They stake claim in the pestilential air
On the burned, polluted flood silts,
Dotted with spindling shrubs,
Their lives as tentative and embattled
As the gnarled and stunted willows,
Barely growing,
In the Rocha riverbed.
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