after @notaleptic
he shakes his head
into the walls of his face: ‘
“los muertos no hablan”
y no algun más
“¿por que?” I ask,
receive no answer.
Tio Juan sees ghosts
pero él está envejeciendo;
él no oye bien, es sordo.
He gets fitful when they don’t
speak where he can hear,
so I sit with him, hold
his hand, listen to his
Jorge Morel records,
in this little room that smells
of dried flowers and candles
y los viejos y el muerte,
whispers and guitars,
mi tio duerme, fitfully,
y yo espero las fantasmas.
***
Elizabeth R. McClellan is a domestic and sexual violence attorney by day and a poet in the margins. Their work has appeared in Illumen Magazine, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares, and Utopia Science Fiction. They are a disabled gender/queer demisexual poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chikashsha Yaki land.
***
image: Lindsay Hargrave
Rejection Letters 