Poets for Ayotzinapa

22 where will the children play before they sign up to the schools of the resistance and prepare their Yucatecan Molotovs of petrol and poems, in the midst of delirium and pillage? 23 I’m talking shit, I’m miriam, saúl, eréndira, I am everyone and I am bones and I am free and boat and roof and I am, sometimes I am, sometimes… 24 it was 10 when I closed the car door, before I let death take me for a stroll, he wanted to show me something, I hardly remember it… 25 who am I? where am I? how long have I been here? 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32… I’m alone and that’s fine, I have in my hand a torch of black light… I am on foot in front of the river that runs ceaselessly, I am alone and that’s fine 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40… in the country of tragedies that are hard to count, I put on my shoes and I snap in one tug my shoelaces, pain and rage fuse in the longing to kill

Poets for Ayotzinapa

Published on Jun 8, 2015

Mexico City Lit

About

These poems are a refusal to let disappearance become a weapon. These poems weave themselves in to that gap between ‘what happened’ and ‘why did this happen’. They try out answers to those questions which are meant to soothe rather than to silence. These poems are melancholy, to be sure, and sometimes manic: cold air and dust-clouds, ash, fog and erasure, spangled pugs on broke-up sidewalks, giant public-transport scorpions, shadows, echoes. But they are too fierce, too serrated to remain mere expressions of mood. These poems are fragmentary. They shatter on the ear. They shunt hard up and down between registers. They yell. They wail. They sob. They never stop. They wear black. They cannot go on like this. They are here because so many are not. They are what poetry always tries to be: speech in search of the absent.

Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.