South of the Border
Mark Osaki
When they uncover what you buried here,
how will you explain an order carried out
in the heat?
Your good intentions evaporated
in every seething village until, like fever,
you broke.
Surprising how a body warms
to oppressive surroundings.
Things rot quickly in the tropics.
This too, you can blame on the climate.
Mark S. Osaki was born in Sacramento, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley as an Alumni Scholar and went on to do graduate work in International Relations and Security Studies. His work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Carrying the Darkness—The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, Texas Tech University Press), South Carolina Review, Men of Our Time—An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America (University of Georgia Press), Breaking Silence—An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (Greenfield Review Press), Onset Review, and Báo Giấy—Vietnamese Poetry.
He has received awards for his poetry from the Academy of American Poets, University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Of his writing, Osaki writes, “Moral ambiguity is the main theme of my poetry; the realization that ethical considerations compel us towards a confrontation. That even good intentions often lead to corruption.”