Excavating a Mass Grave near Tucuman, Argentina

A poem

Do you feel them?

Their cracked lips leave cold, spine-shattering kisses on my neck, their gnarled, overworked fingers caress my curls.

They linger, unable, or maybe unwilling, to leave this place, where their murderers forced them to dig their own graves.

They pass through me, their anger so intense it boils my blood as they drop fragments of memories into my soul, of mothers rocking infants and fathers toiling in a wheat field humming the songs of their ancestors.

They moan and scream and shriek into a void, mourning beautiful lives taken too soon, calling out to dreams they never had a chance to know.

I brush away another layer of dirt, their charred bones intertwined, blurring where one body begins and another ends, closer in death than they were in life.

I completed my ninth skeleton today, a child, and took her fragile hand in mine, hoping wherever she ended up is nicer than here.

Originally published in Sheila-Na-Gig Online.