Ignorant IN IOWA by Victor Camillo dramatizes the conflicts between the realities of the speaker, particularly as this conflict relates to the speaker's guttural reaction to the world events and deaths he reads about in the paper. The speaker begins the line with "I am ignorant in Iowa." He creates his identity right away, yet he challenges what his identity means to himself and to his audience by stating:
"My watch should keep a little time
For the tortured who are shaking for their end."
The speaker needs to be reminded, that there are other people in the world who do have the same freedoms, who live on the brink of death every day, and that his ignorance needs to checked and reminded as to not to fall into complacency. The speaker's situation is not removed from the world, as he sits and chops it up with the folks from the community: "A man sat talking baseball and the lost with me in a coffee shop, How easy it is to wrap them up in words."

This moment with the man is not sustained throughout the poem, since the speaker's heart is not in forgetting or ignoring. The line "how easy it is to wrap them up in words" stands out to me because I identify with the push and pull of what is mine and what are the worlds. The rapes and murders of Juarez women is mine, there is no way to not have an emotional reaction to it. The speaker's voice feels sad and guilty that he cannot do anything about it and some react only to Jesus' s death:
In Iowa we eat our Easter cake with small forks, Sip coffee and talk on the day of the end of the death of Jesus, We are not the dark ones who die for no reason.

The speaker looks through a different lens in Iowa. Iowa is in the middle of nowhere, Iowa is Middle America, where not much happens, its not really diverse, yet there is an upsurge of Mexican immigrants there - working rural Iowa and making it grow. The people of Iowa live in an ignorant and sheltered world; religion seems to be a theme in the poem and how religion keeps the people stagnant and lost in their own world. The speaker creates his identity by changing his tone and stance: “Nobody will dare to walk over to the other side:
But nobody's prayers, knowing what the day is for, Will walk through the church isles and down the stairs, over the border of language through Mexico To Guatemala and El Salvador.” The fact that the speaker gets his news from the New York Times about the deaths and nameless faces of Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala reveals that he is conflicted with his identity. He reveals in this line that the narrator is neither here nor there, neither American enough for Iowa or conscious and politicized enough to know what is going on in the world at every moment. Yet, in the most intimate parts of the day when he is face to face within the mirror:
"And when the hot water steams it and my image twists and bends,
I should be looking at the gray remnants of those who have been erased” the narrator’s face twists and bends, breaks and bends, twists and turns down roads that the darker people will never go down. The narrator’s identity is multifaceted, it seems he can live in many different worlds at once and then
Interestingly, the words that rhyme are "face" and "erased.” Also, there is a tone and rhythm in this poem where words rhyme but not every other line. The rhyme works well with this personal and sometimes fading piece. I say fading because the characters in the poem are only told through the perspective of the narrator, and the narrator has some conflicting emotions about his existence in Iowa, is it privilege or is it "A dot of ink in a newspaper, so many here, a few dozen there."

In poetry & pen,
Melissa