Michael Zbigley Lithograph after “The Horizontal and the Vertical” by Tim Holmes In Acteal, when the bodies fell interweaving on the street, some in fear of the gunfire and some knowing they would never   fear again, but all as a piece, they were cut down for their wish to rise together. In this picture of bare lines, the mat of humanity   clawing over itself, a hand on a leg on a mouth on an eye, is a matrix swelling in the center and the strength   of the weave allows the climb into a trunk of bodies reaching up to where the stark blank skin   gives way to bare wood, a snag away out into the clear. In English we have forgotten   that power is el poder, the able-to-do, action and actual in the striving net of us, the resistance of fear.   In Acteal, people died, and I feel the selfishness of etching their blood into lines of a poem, but what matters is not   the snag like a hand grasping at heaven but the rise of all these bodies together, and in that clawing net, the touch.

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