Poetry
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Etymology of Absence, Ending in a Still Life of the Rio Grande at Sunset

Hernán Cortés said let there light     & the temple of Huitzilopochtli burned
he said let there be a river of gold ripped from the skin of antique gods      & Spanish spread

like wildfire like a plague of locust     & there’s the story of half my blood’s
blood      they awoke one day to an origin half-burning     half-written in Spanish

language, after all, is inherited like history      continually rewritten
by the sharpest sword     my family determined to survive the blade    travelled north

until they no longer recognized the sound      of their own footsteps
Spanish is the smoke lining the trail      the roadmap they’ve carried across countries

stacked atop countries     Spanish is the house they built out of gravestones
a grayrot alchemy      of course they did not wish their children’s children to mourn

the meadow our teeth grew from     so I was taught English like a sharpened edge
like if I speak this way I can clean cut the distance      between what my family was

& all the futures they’ve imagined for me      but I know to trade Spanish for English
is to trade one hatchet for another      please do not misunderstand me     I am grateful

I have a voice at all      what a gift it is to dictate how I am remembered
it’s just when I say my name for all it has inherited      my lungs fill with soot      I inhale

& am cooked alive by light      if I am anything      I am the afterglow of ash
that refuses to remain ash     a child waiting outside a temple     praying for the blood

to wash out of his clothes      what future can I carve for myself      knowing what I do
not know      can I be more than the cinder that gifted me this tongue

is gift the right word     or is it curse     cure    I wish I knew the names of every ancestor
that burned so that I could forget their names      before learning them     I wish

it were as easy as forgiveness      as searching for smoke     or following the border
only to find a jeweled river      babbling    untouched by blood

 

Brandon Melendez is a Mexican-American poet & the author of ‘Gold That Frames The Mirror’ (Write Bloody 2019). He is a National Poetry Slam finalist and two-time Berkeley Grand Slam Champion. A recipient of the the 2018 Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Award, his poems are in or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Emerson College.

 

 


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