Donika Kelly | Poetry
translated from the Spanish by Janel Pineda
“There are no disappeared persons, what happens is that people
change their address or they leave and do not tell anyone.”
—Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, Director of the National Civil Police
(Noticieros La Región, El Salvador)
The good dead go out to party,
or decide at dawn, after an insomniac night,
that it is a good time to go on a long trip.
The good dead, the polite ones,
grab their suitcases without saying goodbye to their mother,
without blowing a single kiss,
without offering hugs to their children.
The good dead do not know of gunpowder.
The good dead do not understand anything of knives.
They would never pronounce the alphabet of blood in public,
and they would not know anything of refined gentlemen asking for their daughter’s hand;
The good dead were never charged for breathing,
The good dead are not buried in mass graves,
to then be announced bitterly in the newspapers.
Let us note:
The good dead, the exemplary ones,
the real dead
are known for having the decency to disappear in silence,
and not going out for some fresh air, nor taking their maggots out for a walk,
and for not having the bad habit of leaving behind tombstones
where their families can come and deposit their tears.
A fable is told in the Far East:
This is little Ming Tang,
in a time that we all ought to forget.
Ming Tang is fourteen years old, and has parents who love her
and a forty-five-year-old man who wants to start a family by her side.
Ming Tang does not want any family other than her own,
but that man only knows the language of dogs.
In his arithmetic: all results lead us
straight to blood.
On a broken-eyed dawn,
Ming Tang abandons that kingdom
and her parents play a silent song amid their rage.
Ming Tang has arrived in a very distant village,
in a time that we all ought to forget,
And her parents awake trying to become the good dead,
and they leave their house like any other day, and greet their neighbors and smile,
and they walk, avoiding the noises,
but finally, they hear the dogs barking,
and they run
as only those other dead run,
those who never learned anything at all.
On the fourth day, Ming Tang receives a letter:
her parents were the bad dead
and as such, they were found by the river’s edge,
amid the flies, together in front of the public eye . . .
Ming Tang cleans her face,
burns the letter, and promises herself
to do a better job than her parents did.
Here are the following instructions:
The good dead must irrevocably renounce their name,
they must have no address other than the deserts and the rivers,
or in the best-case scenario, the backyard of some former policeman.
They must never speak of the winters of tattoos or the cruelty of the boot,
they must be incapable of leaving their fingers behind on the street,
or of allowing anyone to find one of their limbs.
The good dead
will understand that there is not enough life for their deaths.
After many centuries of our own flesh
we will also understand
there was never a promised land
only this: they knew how to disappear the flies.