Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum
The Museum Was Built So No One Would Forget . . .
us, pottery fragments once dusted in warm sand—jagged, mismatched—today, preserved in glass. it began to rain while we walked from the bar, so we came here, listening to artifacts speak about their hieroglyphs, even after we learned the paintings we wanted to see were switched out before morning arrived. yet we wander through modernism and antiquity, stopping to see a vase or shield, the faces of those bending down on the other side of the case. one of them reminds me of him, you say, which is the complete antithesis of today’s adventure—it’s to forget, you emphasized during our second round of drinks. come here, taking your hand, dull blade of a jackknife. and we pause by a sculpture of a green balloon dog. there are no security guards lurking or barricades surrounding the mantle. push it. you’re crazy. imagine it’s from him, make it appear like an accident. you roll your eyes, but lift your hand, pausing by the nose, arm trembling, ready to spread god’s fingerprints with one small shove.
Desaparecidos (or, Memorializing Absence, Remembering the Disappeared)
installation: sculptures
see who’s next to be concealed in harsh twilight. stand behind statues, peephole through gaping exit wounds. yesterday’s papers flutter with mosquitos. go: crumple headlines together. deprived of liberty via a breeze and years of futile searching for the deafening muffle of a rooster crowing. let them call for those kissing palm leaves over mouths, the forcibly taken and disappeared, watch as the flecks of embers in a field of sampaguitas ablaze subsist through crush-glass rain. name, picture, remembrance. the disappeared are not dead, but immaterial with stiff heads, necks, limbs, ab- away, esse- to be in rigor mortis—the bodies’ event horizon—for absence remains: open wound, festering in hectares, eyes scalloped out, sockets blackened inkblots. watch them hold gifts, hands gripping golden frames which contain no archipelagoes or portraits, but recesses. think: deserted mirrors, barren caesarean, flesh turned nuclear winter. child wearing overalls, student in cap and gown, nun’s mouth calcified shut, old man, old woman, snuffed out by candlelight.
