Two Poems

Day of the Dead

It was a long night, a billowing parade. Masked men in sixty-kilo suits threaded with hundreds of little bells that hissed and pealed like so many sheet-metal rainsticks when they moved; three brass bands with more tubas than I’d thought permissible under any circumstances; mezcal in petrol jugs; painted torsos in the cold; wildly costumed children scarf-swaddled up to their noses; thousands pressed together in the churchyard and the streets to glimpse the dancers when they passed, to frenzy themselves a little around the trombones, carry someone on their shoulders; shouts; firecrackers veering up intimately from the crowd in a feint of harmlessness; a bareheaded boy flourishing a set of antlers in his hand; the cemetery down the road ablaze with marigolds and that other, darker flower some call turkey-wattle, some lion’s tooth; hot punch in vats. Brass, velvet, rotgut, fire. Shyly, later, I wondered aloud to A. how all of this—a theater by now, a tradition ballooned and painted over time—does, or doesn’t, actually have anything to do with what people feel death must be. And he straightened up and said something I took to mean—I’m already translating his words into my own song, threading my bells through the cloth—if you understand that death is always there, behind the screen, than whatever you do with joy can be seen, can’t it?, as bound to and born of it. As, you know—wouldn’t this be one way to say it?—a gift. The two brothers we saw dressed as devilish clowns in the town square, darting around and trying to pelt each other with little pellet-cracklers, the sloshed teenagers spilling Fanta on the side of the road, even music itself—isn’t this all somehow an expression of tenderness,
not wrung out of death

but ringing.

Hunting and Gathering

My roommate has spooned out
a papaya, nestled the seeds
in a tiny dish

on the kitchen table for
some end as yet
mysterious to me.

Clodded with orange
pulp, they’re slick and full
as roe. Maybe

she only wants to
grow them back into what
they came from.

Maybe this
invisible organ too
will burgeon

in the casual sun.
I’m clumsy as
a teenager these days,

purpling
my forearm on
things with edges,

slipping spoonfuls
of relish from the jar,
pressing my nose into

my lover’s neck as
if to urge along
my creatureness,

my tentacles’
convictions. I guess
I’m also mash

and pip, a full-
grown fruit that smells
of sweat, is rarely

eaten whole. I wonder
what I’ll long for when
I’m skinned.

_________

Robin Myers is based in Mexico City and works as a translator. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, the Harvard Review, the Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. She is an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.