‘Día de los Muertos’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Because of this recurring feature, I now know that Valentine’s Day and July 4th fall on the same day of the week (except during Leap Years, I guess?). I wasn’t thrilled about having to pick a poem for Valentine’s Day and I’m less thrilled to have July 4th, America’s Day of Independence, as well.
My heart is not in a celebratory place. Each day brings incrementally more dread as my political climate and government continue to fail the vast majority of the people who live with me in my country. July 4th is bombast and bbq, patriotism and patriotism’s poisoned underbelly. Poetry is succor and it’s also a means to plumb deeper into overlapping ever-weeping wounds that make up the body of my country. I wanted to highlight ‘Wreckage,’ the long poem by Danez Smith in [Insert] Boy that is a journey of pain, of death, of family, of being black and poor and queer in America. The poem isn’t available online, but you should get that book if you haven’t already. Do it now.
Instead, I circled back to one of my favorite poets, Roy Guzmán, and his poem ‘Día de los Muertos’ in Winter Tangerine. And before I get to this poem I want to point you to Guzmán’s ‘Restored Mural for Orlando,’ an incredible response to the Pulse shooting. But ok, back to ‘Día de los Muertos.’
This poem isn’t meant to be in conversation with July 4th but if you’re American I ask you to sit with it on this day and see where these images find root for you.
Our parents sorrow gifts like homeless magi
the difference between failure & love is where / you draw the incision
In the boy’s bedroom our hairs parted / like maps looking for their rivers
Every year we raised the dead we thanked them for the floods / thanked them for how missing bodies tend to float / when we plan to find them.
Today is just a day. It’s also a day that is as much a celebration of un-interrogated history as it as anything else. Today, and any other day, find another inch of space for other stories, other histories. Keep going, keep emerging, keep learning and unlearning and learning anew.