Day of the Dead
Calaveras Literarias
I’d buried my past selves in desert graves
where the authorities wouldn’t look.
Now, they’ve returned, dressed in my clothes,
masked with my likeness,
assuming a seat at the table.
Don’t they know how I’ve celebrated
the years of their absence?
I won’t share their bitter jokes.
I won’t scar the altar with their empty bottles.
I’m telling them to go.
I wish them into that outer world
beyond my caring. The soul I clawed back
from a sand filled skull, I offer only to you,
who breathed life into my remains.
Lungs
Once they seemed as innocent
as a milk bottle soul, these wings
that carried me in updrafts of breath.
Now, they appear on my CT scan
like the peppered moths darkened
by industrial melanism
in Victorian London. Unable
to catch wind, they drag me earthward,
though the longing is still there
to fly invisibly on grafted feathers
like H. C. Andersen’s fellow traveler,
an underworld man returned
from his unpaid casket to slay
the ogre and unhex the black swan,
redeeming her beauty,
as these blots, these erasures,
this corruption in the chest,
might yet be the source of creation.
Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. His poetry has appeared recently in Jersey Devil, Stonecrop, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Waccamaw and other publications. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.