Family Portrait as the Golden Mummies of Bahareya
By Andy Young
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
A couple faces one another as if in conversation. This is how they were found. Now they lie in vitrines like fish in facing tanks. Could not speak if they could speak. They were dressed for their death passage, not to be specimens in glass. Her bare breasts shine like doorknobs. Linen wraps for the poor, gold masks for the rich, eyes so lifelike excavators gasped when they brushed the dust away. The revolution left no money for excavation; thousands of mummies still lie in burrowed tunnels under the houses and roads. The dead do not ponder revolutions, but they like to sometimes be considered. Small mourning statues were found in the tombs, meant to eternally weep at their side. One man is a merchant with a Horus crown. Tolemic, someone says. Our son points to another’s thickly outlined eyes. He is awake, he says, but does not answer. A stone girl, five years old, too poor for a golden crown; my daughter, also five, asks if they’re the same size—yes, almost exactly. For a while, this is how our children will think of death: gilded bodies that keep their shape, wide-eyed and adored.
Andy Young's second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October 2024 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. See andyyoung.org.
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Oh, this is gorgeous.