archaeology

  1. my mother decides that sundays are the day for broken things. the week dies into cracks and i need to learn to suture it.
  2. to learn a surgeon’s profession you must first observe wounds. learn about dressmakers. my mother’s mother’s mother was a seamstress. the madrid of the postwar years only knew about fragments. my mother nursed on the torn apart.
  3. think of the world far from the world. consider the wound inside the glass case. does the glass lock up the pain? there is a piece of a leg, an elbow, half an ankle. achilles is one-eyed. the vessels give up in the face of time. time amputates myths. archeological museums summarize the mutilation of the ages. mutilated time.
  4. in the archeological museum there is a deer scapula. someone decorated it before time was called time. in spain three million chickens are killed every day. two saturdays a month i gnaw the wings down to the bones. twelve volts, slit throats and bleeding out. that’s not death.
  5. in the archeological museum there are also two sepulchers. i’ve never been in those rooms. you have to think of the wound far from the bones. my mother amputates me from the world.
  6. metaphor is a secure place. in the deaths of men there is pain. you don’t have to see it.
  7. only men have real bones.
  8. when the surgeon fails, the thanatopractor camouflages the disaster. if the adequate colors are applied, death is no more than the inevitable evolution of sleep. the dead also give up in the face of time. thanatopraxy is another form of pottery. an ephemeral art.
  9. i’m weaned from my mother. in spain five hundred and sixty million chickens continue to be killed per year. time still cuts vessels. i renounce sundays of broken things.
  10. in the natural history museum there are no glass cases containing the wound. death is an instrument for knowledge. animals don’t sleep. they fly, run, take their heads out of the holes of their burrows. death is undressed. and celebrated.
  11. taxidermy is thanatopraxy for animals. men are no longer animals.
  12. there is no dignity in the deaths of men.
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Helena García Mariño
Helena García Mariño, Madrid (Spain), 1990. She studied Law and Political Science and Comparative Literature in Madrid, Spain. She’s graduated in May, 2017, in the MFA in Spanish Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. She´s currently working on her first book of poems, "the tongue in pieces."