The word spreads around the camp
and the men are summoned from the gold mines.
Dead silence. The Inca girls tell
string over their knuckles,
the healer heads towards the Temple of the Sun.
One by one, the white women birth
bleeding monstrosities:
some are tinier than kittens,
all gasp unsuccessfully for breath
like creatures spat against a rocky shoreline.
No one talks, or makes a sign,
although the Spanish shift to manage Quechua,
set free again the locked-up Inca prince.
Noon in PotosÃ. It is three generations
before one single woman has a baby that lives,
centuries until anyone works out why.