I used to think Mexicans were grim. Dia de los Muertos. Skeletons driving wagons filled with avocados to market. Grinning skeletons driving hearses. But we all die, don’t we?

Eternal death joins eternal life, the cycles of nature, seed to rot.

Mexicans have their Dia de Los Muertos, but Americans worship death every day. In this militarized nation, we bow to the prosthetic device. We kiss the cold metal with our cold lips. We take our youth, make them soldiers, turn them into stick figures, make them heroes of the Paralympics.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and Queen’s Ferry Press’s Best Small Fictions for work published in 2011 through 2015. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.