Buenos Aires, 2003 

The door of the place that won’t let go opens into a white room.

The key opens the door, I turn, step hard into another room—

my face meets a wall, mirrored glass stretching to window above

the street, doubling the room, doubling the body in this city of shades,

reflections, translation. Laughing, I back out the door to jacaranda trees,

roots pulling up the sidewalk, purple flowers dropped like earrings

sold outside the gates of Recoleta, the cemetery where El Gran Gomero,

hundreds of years old, stands with buttress roots and metal rods. 

An Atlas sculpture of car parts shoulders one giant limb. In this city I too

gather my parts once erased by a story of changed names, a person

I pretended to be. Here each mirrored wall contains buried sightings

of the lost, memory’s stubborn catalogue. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo

still march around the plaza, their white headscarves with names of children

disappeared fifty years ago during military rule. Stolen from the generals’

enemies, given to their friends. Those who spoke out were disappeared into jails

or dropped by planes into the sea. Check the self in translation, walk the double,

dance the slow, slow, quick-quick slow begun in La Boca, the mouth. Fly the legs

like ropes behind you. Step forward. Ocho back, collect the feet, the other parts.

Legs grown heavy as old trees. One more stolen face doubling before the mirror,

triples in translation. The third version rises from two different languages

like bones dredged from the river Plate’s

saltwater layer,

love handed through oblivion,

memory’s body.

Heather H. Thomas

12.9.2024