Poetry: For Ayotzinapa by Matty Layne Glasgow
Poetry and tragedy cannot be divorced. With “For Ayotzinapa,” this is abundantly clear. Matty Layne Glasgow writes a commanding tribute to the students who lost their lives a handful of years ago—commanding our attention with dryly cut images and visual language that targets the nerve endings in our neck, our “leaf blossom fingers,” our bones.
For Ayotzinapa
On September 26, 2014, 43 students from the
Raúl Isidro Burgos Normal School of Ayotzinapa
were detained by local police in Iguala, Guerrero.
They were never seen again.
when you left I bathed
the baby in the kitchen sink
he turned to ashes in my arms
that’s how I learned
to be covered in loss
to wear it like the black
hood tied around
your neck, hands bound
to be severed fingers
plunged into the red soil
your eyes opened to a star-
less night sky but you
didn’t need the sun
to burn now i feel
the heat in every sunrise
& look out the window
to where our state cut you
down, your limbs down, your
trunk & body & leaf blossom
fingers down heart down
i found it in the riverbed
char-soaked from a narco
blaze the kind that smells
like it don’t give a fuck like
our state belongs to him
I knew where to bury you
to make you grow again
so you disappeared once
more beneath this land
of bone chips & dried flesh
i’d never watched a man
rise pull himself out
of the earth
body & branches still
covered in ash that’s how
you learned to live again
i haven’t looked out
the window since that day
too afraid of what
I might see the way
you stand rooted in death
& feel the wind blow right
through you like bullets
Matty Layne Glasgow
Matty Layne Glasgow is a queer pixie of a poet and MFA Candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University where he served as the Poetry Editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. Matty’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from journals here and there, including BOAAT, The Collagist, Rattle, Muzzle Magazine, Wildness, and elsewhere. He presently reads poetry for The Adroit Journal.
