Nov. 12, 2023
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Tumbleweed
By Erubey Mercado
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Tumbleweed
By Erubey Mercado
But where do you go when the landlord has demolished your dwelling?
When the houses of worship have closed their doors to people like you,
and when the comforts of the body you once knew have dissipated and
disappeared.
When did grief become my home? When did pain inhabit all parts of my body?
Did you see me when I was back in town?
What place is there to return to when the structures of support you thought you could rely on disintegrate and declare you dead before the search party has even been announced?
Can I still find healing in the Sierra Nevadas?
Can I still find a home in a place that fully broke me?
Home has become synonymous with memento mori, a place where death has
always lived. But in the chilling months, you may find me at the graveyard of my childhood.
Did you see me parked outside your mother’s house, crying and howling at the
moon?
It’s strange to stay in a town my bloodline still resides in. A place that sometimes only felt like home because I was born there, but feels less so with every journey back for I have died and found resurrection in the body that houses me.
Did you see the apparition floating down unlit hallways wearing my favorite dress?
Home is now a place where I feel relief that no one knows my name, no one to run into to ask me how I am doing
No one to lie to
Home is the place I store my sorrows
Did you see me at the sight of Fort Ryland?
At the tomb that’s just rocks and crumbled concrete
Where a ghost sits displaced and disheartened
How mystifying it is to pay a visit to a city where places that my mother doesn’t remember don’t exist anymore
Places that can now only be accessed in my memory, which is bound to go as well.
Erubey Mercado
Erubey Mercado (she/her) is a queer disabled poet and visual artist who currently resides on Tongva land. Erubey can frequently be found being melancholic while staring out a window or baking before dawn. Her favorite quote comes from Toni Cade Bambara and it reads: “The role of
the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
Image description: Mid-chest selfie portrait of Erubey, a fair-skinned
Hispanic femme with brown eyes, standing outside, with an out-of-focus
tree and foliage in the background. The sun is illuminating her closed
smiling face. She is wearing a green dress with a small white floral
pattern and a black camisole underneath. Her brown S-shaped wavy
hair falls down past her shoulders.