mónica teresa ortiz

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.

© The Acentos Review 2019