Duende and The Great Matter of Life-and-Death
By Karen Morris
Garcia Lorca called me last night (Before you get in a twist, he called you too.
You didn’t pick up.) He said, “Disappearance and Death are real.” I suggested he text
but, texting’s too flat for the poetics of death. “Sure,” you said to no one
out loud, ridding yourself of the bitter taste on your tongue.
I feel you quicken, slow drifting away. Turning the trail by checking the volume,
counting the likes, followers, following. Disappearance after disappearance. There’s no
way to count the air. You think you know death. The Day of the Dead is just
ink. Garcia Lorca called you last night. Your line was dead.
Playing at death in the House of Numb.
Ay! Valiant cruising Internet!
Ay! Needles nattering!
Garcia Lorca is calling from Portland. Pick up!
Pick up! You’ve disappeared again, strategized
a pretext. Blackout. Death
is instantaneous. Torture, endless. Hunger,
slow. Shit a scandal of humiliation. Torment
deeper than a half-life is long.
The afternoon is ordinary. You are about to take a next breath, to shoot
an email to your publisher that contains your manuscript, Daily Minutia. The server
is hungry for fresh insights. It drags your text into the nearest hog-
shaped cloud. You have no teeth to speak of.
You ponder atomic particle theory. Trying
to manifest reality,
bitch-slap the keyboard.
He called from the marshes of Satilla Shores where there’s no reception at all.
He called from Minneapolis through a busted windpipe to tell you of the mastermind.
He called from Louisville awakened by a battering ram.
He called from Portland choking out the names of vanished people.
He left you a message from Chicago about meeting up in Kansas City,
He said, blossoms fall on the Day of the Dead.
You are a dreaded weed about to be pulled.
Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (2015, NAAP) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, The Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession and an Ambassador of Hope for Shared Hope International in the role of volunteer public educator concerning the impact of the commercial sex industry in the sex trafficking of children around the world. She is a cofounder of Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, New York.
Image: David Alfaro Siqueiros Echo of a Scream, 1937, MOMA.