Here in the heat of the cemetery, in the peeling heels of children’s feet, in the sweat of stone-watchers and ghost-hunters.

Here among the living headstones, among the itchy onion grass that whets naked shins and smells of cutting boards.

Here the worms are unashamed of their slime, of the apple core that’s marked with man spit, of the millennia that they chew up and excrete.

Here there is a fork skewering the dirt, behind a wizened rock. Do we eat the dead or the macaroni?

Here near driveways and dining halls that pump bodies like blood vessels.

Here puddles deceive, and wary boots wonder how deep they have to splash before they squish mummified ligaments and moldy old teeth.

Here spiders are overlooked architects; redesigning wreaths of webs, forever breaking in the path of kneecaps and night things.

Here a boy of blackheads and hope breathes close to a girl who believes that the shadows are alive.

Here where hand carvings reign, where cubist hearts and communist quotes and severed genitalia are art unlike anywhere else.

Here where hand carvings hurt, where death stares back at the vandal’s split tongue, where the rain promises to restore the memoriams.

Here in this place of picnic and prayer, of half-drunk beer bottles and half-hearted psalms.

Here among the incense-wringers, among the flag-stickers and the flower-bringers, among the rusted rosaries and framed pictures of withered, smiley grand-people.

Here for the remembered ones, and their forgetful nieces who hop from patch to patch of green grave grass while their parents hiss, “Not here!”

Here for the forgotten ones, for the moss-masked stones that once bore names that now no one knows, that died from yellow fever/diphtheria/polio before their time. Long before ours or within their own?

Here lie not the forgotten ones, but the rotten ones.

Here there are mysteries of after beings, of what becomes when the earth contains us, of who we are when we are dust.

Here there are no mysteries, only such.

© 2017 Stellular Scribe