Audio Excerpt: History Here Requires Balboa
Here is audio of me reading a poem from my chapbook, History Here Requires Balboa. This poem takes up an apocryphal story of Montezuma’s death at the hands of Cortez: death by molted gold down the throat. While that’s probably not how he died–many scholars think he was stoned to death by his own people after Cortez took him prisoner–the image of such an execution marries brutality and desire in a way that seems, in some way at least, truer than history.