All Souls Procession for Marcella Sali Grace

The living tributes to the late Marcella Sali Grace continue to evolve and spiral in a way that begins to beggar the rational suspension of disbelief, especially considering that we are talking about a young person who was not yet twenty-one when she was raped and murdered in Oaxaca in September.

A memorial to this lamented spirit, based on K. Curtis Lyle's long poem Sali's Ark, will be the next Poetry Scores project, probably in the spring, up and down Cherokee Street, where Sali would have been most at home here in St. Louis.

We have much to learn from the All Souls Procession conducted in Sali's living memory on November 9 at the Dry River Radical Resource Center, in Tucson, one of Sali's many stomping grounds. And she did stomp on that ground. Steev Hise has filmed and uploaded a striking video document of this procession.

I, for one, am humbled by the passion, imagination, and daring that went into this tribute. The thought of competition in grief is, of course, absurd, but we'll need every fire eater, acrobat, and burlesque artist in St. Louis to even begin to equal this Tucson tribute in keeping Sali's spirit alive through ritual enactment.

The Barking Zanahorias blog is refreshed regularly with moving prose tributes to Sali by a friend who is keeping up with the evolving international tributes to her.

Sali's father John Eiler has written a powerful poem about his daughter, about what he taught her and what he wishes he had taught her.

Catherine Eiler's story about Sali, delivered at the St. Louis memorial service, remains the most succint statement of the remarkable facts of her life.

Finally - for, now - there will be no "finally," for Sali - this photo is pulled from Shagethelma's Flickr site, which pays tribute to Sali via the Day of the Dead ceremony in Tucson.