This week we bring you poems by MJ Santiago and Andres Rojas that hold us close for what comes next, from our series "This Work Will Take Dancing" highlighting the poetry and of Latinx writers in the U.S. South. In a time where many are discussing the question of apocalypse, the question of endings, these poems invite us to consider what remains—after violence, after loss. To believe in the lens of poetry is to believe that what lingers beneath individual disappointment and longing is something collective, universal, and even magnificent. "I am standing in a time / softer than it looks," writes MJ Santiago and "Still, someone has brought flowers" writes Andres Rojas. May we always remember to bring them.
Read more from 'This Work Will Take Dancing' here.
memory of college with the super blue blood moon
standing in the small woods
where my college boyfriend wanted
to have sex, light
from the library window,
silhouettes of students,
shadows on leaves —
he said I was boring
and I ate it
as stones.
I am standing in a time
softer than it looks.
mulch on steps
leading me into ravine,
breath catching bugs.
I remember my body most
from where the water
left, made itself wet.
AND A GREAT PART OF ME WILL ESCAPE THE GRAVE
–near Dahlonega, Georgia
Yellow as the late October sun
there was a dust in these hills
once, and other peoples,
long departed. Might as well
honor the bumblebees, felling-
saw loud. Might as well
mourn grass. What was carved
has given up its hold:
blank as quicksilver
the Hickory Flats gravestones,
slate weathered smooth
by scarcity and years. All
had a name, a first day,
a last one as themselves.
No more. Still, someone
has brought flowers
paper-white and red:
plastic, two per grave.