cempasuchil

my brother was born on the day of the dead
my mother who didn’t know how to be afraid of death
saw it i think as an auspicious omen because he almost didn’t
survive to be born because my father hadn’t wanted him to be born
afraid that something would be wrong with him as if we hadn’t all
been born more than a little wrong into a world that didn’t
try all that hard to make us less wrong less hurt

my brother wrote a poem about our great great maybe it
was only one great grandmother who lived to be 115 years old
who was exiled by her family to a shack who lived like an animal 
my father said because she was a full blooded india and the family 
was ashamed and maybe they thought if she lived outside she
wouldn’t teach any of her descendants to be indios like she was 
as if they could will away what she was what they were

my brother wrote that she must have cursed us all
of her descendants living and to come with the same darkness
that made our great great maybe only one great grandfather decide
to set a time and date and then announce his death to his entire
family to order and pay for the food and pan dulce for the
reception and then i presume to dress himself and shine his boots
and select the rope and hang himself at 4 in the afternoon

my brother survived his time in the womb survived and grew to be
the tallest and strongest of us all survived and was born without
causing any pain to our mother was born humming and content and
perhaps already dreaming of flowers and earth and delicious food
and music and words and all the things he was born already loving
but i think it gave my heart a little pause a strange little echo told me
it was important that he was born on the day of the dead

i had to travel 2000 miles northward to learn about altars and the
day of the dead built my first altar in upstate new york and later
tied what i learned there to my mother’s memories of graveyards in
south texas it was in new york that i learned the significance of
marigolds to the day of the dead  i don’t have my mother’s or my
brother’s talent or passion for growing gardens but i think that was
when i started the garden of marigolds in my heart

and time and life converted those gardens into entire fields so vast
you could walk from sunup to sundown and never see the
beginning or end of them  and i wrote a story about a girl named
cempasuchil and i tasted marigold petals and ate their color and
their velvet feel and their histories of sunlight and people say they
have a favorite flower but i don’t think that’s true i think
sometimes a flower might decide to claim us to name us their own

my mother didn’t tell me or maybe she didn’t know to tell me as
she only lived to be 13 years older than i am now that i would need
all those fields of marigolds because now that my brother is gone
every day is his borning day and every day is his dying day and
every day is the day of the dead and this means i have a
tremendous need for bouquets and bouquets of marigolds

ire’ne lara silva is the author of four poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Most recently, ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine and is working on a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. A new poetry collection, the eaters of flowers, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in January 2024. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com