A wak’a (or huaca) was a spiritual place or monumental object among Quechua-speaking people in South America. Huaca especially gained ceremonial importance under the Inka Empire, where the object-places mapped cosmological and imperial lines on the religiopolitical landscape. They were usually composed of stone (either natural or manipulated) and likely marked a liminal space between the spiritual and material worlds.
1. Grids
Today, of moments:
Paraguayan contra-
band cigarettes and
the sunset in subtle Andean
purples over a brewery
of a beer we drink here,
for which I have a tab at
the across the way shop—
garrulous señora proprietor—
knitted curls, tight smile, always
knowingly adding to my tab the beers,
the tab generated in a gridded note-
book and made out to
El Gringuito.
That night in that gridded market town,
where I waved my flaming shot
immolated hand like a torch
over the pool table at
the Highest Irish Pub in the World
before babbling wild
in the tongue of San Juan Bautista—
patron saint of xanax-pisco cocktails.
He said through me:
“Meaning is coincidence and
coincidence is time.”
2. An Hospedaje
At a timeless truck stop
on the Panamericana,
on the southern desert coast
where papayas taste like the sun
and pisco like the moon,
we drink two bottles together.
An Afroperuvian truck driver
peels me off the tile floor
of the security-barred patio
with hanging cardboard cutout
ads for soda.
And then she ushers me to our room
in this nameless hospedaje that
I know again
for the very first time
when I rise to the golden light:
the plastic palms and cream walls.
We lie clutching each
other wondering how
we get home from here.
3. Ethnogenesis
Your voice
the machinistic
residue of Practice or
pisco evaporated from
the small batch
ceramic vats squatting,
decorative on the lawn
of a gas station
we see simultaneous-
ly as we speed by
to shrill Cumbia tunes
after wandering
a bleached wilderness
on the edge of town.
The crumpled flowers
I brought you
from Andagua—
cactus blooms and
snapdragons grown
crazy in the shade
of a volcano,
ethnogenetic ancestor
from which all
state-citizens once
crawled
flaming.
And you set those blossoms
in a red plastic mug
on the windowsill
before you left and
I threw them away yesterday.