The Museum of Modern Matrimony

One out of two marriages becomes a museum,
a sprawling, brawling Guggenheim
where feuding tour guides curate
dueling exhibits.

Art imprecates life
far more than life imprecates art,
so the galleries go up first.
Impressionist portraits of absinthe arguments.
Realism exhibitions on what happened
at the office at night.
Surrealistic landscapes agonizing over
the persistence of memory.

Paleontology thunders in,
with its insufferable, insoluble debates.
Did Matrimonius Rex evolve from the Pregosaur?
Would Divorciraptor hunt in packs?
Was the extinction of F. elicitas gradual or abrupt?
What, if anything, can be extracted
from an A. morous trapped in amber?

Love letters are burned,
but plenty of parchment fills the historical archives.
Declarations of war and independence.
Emancipation proclamations.
Revisionist history divided by B.C. and A.D.
Before Conjugium.
Anno Divortium.

Giant pendulums offer important lessons
on the movement of bodies.
A body in emotion tends to stay in emotion.
Force equals sass times frustration.
For every attraction, there is an equal and opposite distraction.

Rocks remember,
but everyone forgets the geology exhibits.
Eroded sentimentary layers.
Glaciation rates, permafrost expansion.
Continental drift, a few centimeters each year.

And of course,
the gift shop,
just past the “Friends of the Museum” donor wall,
where fieldtrippers buy models
to build at home.

Sleet-slapped (on Dia De Los Muertos)

Disgrace sent me spiraling back
into the single-strand spiderweb of my hometown.
Forty-two relatives
from five generations
were lying in wait.

Past the event horizon
of the cemetery gates,
I metronomed between gravesites.
Contemplated the debris of one century, then another.
Evaded the forty-second marker in Babyland.

No picnics, no pan de la muerta, no champurrado,
only the vomiting of my affliction, my unearned shame,
my words falling on dead ears.

Rising from the constellation of tombstones,
Los Muertos glittered and glowered
and suckerpunched the clouds purple and blue,
unfurling the family’s bruised tapestry:

the emigrations, and the newly arrived
building altars for the newly deceased;
the alkaline soil, and the collapsed family farms;
those who pushed farther west, and the rain that did not;
polio and scarlet fever,
stiff joints and stiff wheelchairs,
and joints that refused to bend, not even to propose;
miscarriages and SIDS deaths,
the children that never were and those that would always be;
the gas leak and house explosion,
the single wall that remained and the family that didn’t;
vehicle collisions, accidental or otherwise,
the forsaken highways and jilted gravel roads;
alcoholism and mental illness,
children raised on steady diets of abuse and suicide;
bitter feuds with relatives abiding two decades of silence,
now stashed two feet apart, headstones faced away from each other.

The rain turned brittle.
November, La abuela más antigua,
sleet-slapped my face and tugged my earlobe,
stage-whispering dirges and elegies.

I waited until my sleeves were soaked,
then wiped clean one hundred and fifty years
of sandstone, granite, and marble.
My laughter blessed the boneyard.

Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet and writer whose work focuses on trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa’s work has been featured most recently in Plainsong Review, Hole in the Head Review, and The Shallot.