The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama

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The Dead Dream Us

1.

Ghosts pass between homes, between cuts of earth,
between hills and rivers—impressions
rippling the gown of a giantess.

Those-who-look-for-her climb into her pressed palms.
They inhale roses, listen to stars chime like church bells.
From there, all the world could fit in her hand.

2.

For the dead, we want to grieve,
for you and your labor, for the churches built
from the stones of your cities.

In the same breath, we must admit, a people grew
despite and from this suffering—its hopeful crossings,
its schools of erasure, its white and brown parents.
And I am a person from this origin
who did not suffer as much.

3.

Some say Our Lady of Guadalupe is an assimilation.
Then she is also mine and my family’s too.
It is difficult to admit this without judgment,
or without wondering if I am a kind of dream
or disappointment for the dead who came before.

The last time my grandfather visits his brother
in Mexico, he says he’s watched all his grandchildren
go to college. And wasn’t this what he hoped?

But in town with his brother’s friends,
he is so old, he can’t remember the language.
Embarrassed, he can only nod, his lips pressed in.

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