BIO
mónica teresa ortiz is a poet born and raised in Texas. Her first poetry collection, muted blood, was published by Black Radish Books in 2018. Her forthcoming chapbook of crónicas, autobiography of semiromantic anarchist, is published by Host Publications and due March 2019. ortiz is the poetry editor for Raspa Magazine, a Queer Latinx literary and art journal.
Follow her on Instagram: @elgallosalvaje.
burials
as public spectacles
Borges claimed there is a public me and a private me but I don’t know the
difference because we share the same passwords so where I do put all this
autonomy should I bury it in the borderlands outside Del Rio, Texas, where my
ancestors bleached by the sun rot in unmarked graves segregated by skin? Where
we bury a body is decided by sovereignty and the state. Perhaps we should build
more memorials to remember that the public and the private are not all that
separate under the current specter of surveillance called safety and security.
Oscillate between meanings of violence be them divine symbolic mythic or
colonial, I should be more like Antigone and dig up bones that belong to me
despite protestations of law, and work harder to undo mythologies in which we
YouTube clips of Columbine to comprehend physical violence while changing the
topic of systemic violence as easily as Kenneth Goldsmith remixed Michael
Brown’s autopsy and called it poetry.