Here Remembering Araju, Killed at 17

Encountering “Project 42: Gwen Amber Rose Araju, Newark, CA, 2021,” by Molly Vaughan.“The artist and her team create garments that commemorate the lives of murdered transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. Using Google Earth, Vaughan takes screen shots of locations [of] murders. She manipulates the digital images to make abstract patterns…printing them on fabric…”

–National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2024

How transfigured screen shots memorialize lives.

Patterned cloth multiplies the violence,

the grief,

the courage to reveal themselves.

How the artists transferred printed

proxies marking murder onto cloth wallpaper

that transforms the room.

Transfusion of compassion.

How the artists stitched a tunic, here suspended,

shape-shifting as we who are alive stir the air.

Reminders that Gwen Amber Rose once dressed

and undressed each day a body

that transported their never-to-be-recreated selves.

How the dress waits for activists

to transilluminate lives

when they wear it to march, to witness,

to transfix hate. Burn through it

as a magnifying glass on this wallpaper,

focusing the sun’s power,

would burn it up if,

if the cloth were no longer needed

to focus our attention.

Ashes rising on a transcendental breeze would mourn.

Merryn Rutledge is a widely published poet. She won Orison Book’s 2023 Best Spiritual Literature poem prize. Find her book, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed, at Kelsay Books. Merryn teaches poetry, reviews books by women, and works for social justice. She taught literature and writing at Phillips Exeter Academy before running a leadership consulting firm.