From “For Alex Pretti” by Joseph Fasano

From "For Alex Pretti"
by Joseph Fasano

because he had learned to say it
by standing each night beside the dying;
because sometimes he held their hands;
because he hade lived only as long
as the scent of childhood in an album;

I didn’t know Alex Pretti’s name until he was gunned down by Gestapo-level customs and border protection officers. The fact that a nurse is murdered in public for trying to provide aid to someone who may have been injured is insane. This is the America that the Republicans want. They want innocent people arrested and murdered. They’re pushing replacement theory to fan the flames of racist hatred.

Joseph Fasano’s “For Alex Pretti” documents the last moment of the hero’s life. How he has been trained to ask someone who is in distressed if they are okay. His imagery conjures up the nurse that Pretti was as if consulting a the nation as it were his patient— “a country is dying;/and a man laid his face/on its pavement today/as thought he were listening/to a patient’s heart—”.

What followed after Alex Pretti’s murder was a smear campaign. Much in the way they rightwing machine generated AI images of Renée Good, they tried to destroy Pretti’s image. Demonizing him while celebrating his murderers—Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, both of which are fellow south Texans, with Ochoa graduating from the same university that I did. Ochoa and Gutierrez are prime examples of vendidos, Latino men who are willing to their own under the bus for a seat at the white table.

But never invitation never comes, boys. Just ask Ernst Röhm.

To read “For Alex Pretti” in full, please visit Upaya Zen Center.