The version of this poem used to create this guide appears in: Forche, Carolyn. The Country Between Us (1981).

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

"The Colonel" was written in 1978 when the author was in El Salvador working as a journalist for Amnesty International. At that time the country was in the midst of a harrowing civil war between the US-backed military junta regime and a group of left-wing organizations collectively known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. Forche was tasked with investigating and writing about human rights violations that were reportedly being committed by the military leadership.

Forche's work in El Salvador as a journalist may explain her choice to write "The Colonel" as a prose poem, instead of shaping it in a more traditional poetic format. The poem, written in a narrative voice, describes a dinner gathering at the home of 'the colonel' in which the speaker and another guest listen to their host casually reveal horrific war atrocities and his own participation in them. The speaker thus becomes aware of her own tenuous position in the country as she is forced to confront the brutality of what is going on around her.