Year of the Dig
by Danielle Mitchell
Ashes of the soul is a kind of potato. I save the National Geographic to prove it at parties. Seventy-seven plays, forty-five operas, seven movies & five ballets have been made on Cleopatra, but her tomb evades us. Makes the daughter-in-law cry is another potato. Proxemics is the study of our need for space from each other. A Dominican woman thinks she found the site; her teachers assume she will fail; she stakes red flags around a temple of Isis anyway. Out-waits the Arab Spring. They say Cleopatra decided where & when & by whom she’d be found. In her immaculate sarcophagus, hugging the jar of pickled asps that she has hugged for centuries with a smile carved onto her eternal lips. The torture of this. Would she like us to know she spared no expense with the glitz, scarab-encrusted-everythings but how in the end Mark Antony’s bones were thrown in a sack among the maids’ intestines. Our plans fail like stars over cities. In the worst year of my life, there were people gathered in listening to the story, a thousand times told. There’s a potato called Guinea pig fetus, there’s Cleopatra the hostess knowing where & when & by whom down to the hour of day, napkin rings. This is the difficulty with parties.
from Makes the Daughter-In-Law Cry
(Tebot Bach, 2017)