Día de los Muertos

I.

On the eve of all mumbling saints a gutted piñata burns

in a pregnant vision of an embrace. I approach & dip

my drinking plastic straw into the fire. Someone else’s birthday

sentence plays in the background— cake at the edges

of ours mouths. Our parents sorrow gifts like homeless magi.

Mosquitoes— though we’ve christened them zancudos

closer to zanganos slackers parasites what our folks called us

—swivel with the charred torn news of our despair.

II.

Boy with deer knees like the mother I found dead one evening

on the side of a road under construction. What are we

witnesses to that is implicating us insufficiently? Boy

with thick eyelashes canonized in a white cotton dress like

that side of honesty that misconstrues it as cliché but most

human —the difference between failure & love is where

you draw the incision—. Boy in military clothing. Boy in sinking

flotilla. Through the straw the fire burns my finger.

III.

Biblical row of mothers— arms around their boys in the kitchen—

sleeves perfumed— skin as smooth as holy water

before it stains. In the boy’s bedroom our hairs parted

like maps looking for their rivers. We carve out a canvas

out of our fears whispers— intimacy of this kind is smoothed

with shovels by the police now the military —tell me why

I haven’t stopped digging myself out of this ground —tell me

when we’ll pull our country from that chalked potholed road.

IV.

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. After a few beers our fathers

returned from their lovers’ beds bolted down our doors.

From an infantile zoo we’d burst out running. How many lives

have I left ensnared— lives still learning to stretch out

their shadows —strategies to grow out new mouths—

consume only the heart of the deer carry the rest home?