Meditation on Grief by Saúl Hernández

My therapist says, Grief is like filling a ballon with water

until it gets so heavy it bursts. I think of Apá,

how when he arrived to the states, he drank so much beer

you could smell his brother’s suffocation off of him; how he still sits outside

at night, looks up at the stars searching for his brother’s face. He was never taught to mourn.

Instead he carries grief like me. When it rains, he takes cover so he

won’t fill up and burst like my tía. When she lost her husband, we would carry

her like water in our arms, lay her in the tub, run cold rivers all over her body

until it would enter her skin like knives, —and she’d yell: MARIO! My therapist says,

grief comes at different stages in our lives. I tell her how somedays I wake up

to Amá’s voice ringing in my ear, I can’t go to Mexico. I tell her how Amá sent me

to burry her father when she couldn’t go. I tell her how my brother and I carried

my abuelo’s casket around the town; our bodies on the verge of collapsing from the weight.

My therapist says, how does that make you feel? I tell her, it reminds me of a recurring

dream of water: how Apá and I get stuck in a flash flood while driving.

She says, grief can manifest in dreams. In mine, water leaks through

the thin cracks of our car door, Apá looks at me, no tengas miedo.

The doors don’t open and neither of us can break the windshield, we laugh until

water goes inside of us.

Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX. He was raised by undocumented parents and as a Jehovah's Witness. Saúl has a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. He's a finalist for Palette Poetry 2020 Spotlight Award. Also, a finalist for the 2019 Submerging Writer Fellowship, Fear No Lit; semi-finalists for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Nimrod Literary Journal. His work is forthcoming/featured in Cherry Tree, Atlanta Review, Quarterly West, PANK Magazine, Pidgeonholes, The Acentos Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Normal School, Rio Grande Review, and Adelaid Literary Magazine. He's also part of the Macondo Writers Workshop. He's the Managing Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and lives in Austin, TX. You can find him on social media at @el_saulhdez and www.saulhernandez.net