EMBLEMATIC FESTIVAL OF ECUADOR
Hipólito Alvarado (Ecuador, 1929)
alrededor de los ojos de ella
hoy he vuelto a ver unos ojos
desde nunca siempre vistos
desde tres esquinas de tiempo de trompo
desgirando hacia atrás su propia espiral
en otros ojos más pequeños
que atisban desde adentro
la tarde de niños y de pájaros
jugando en el portal las bolas oo o oo
bajando
una
escalera
ojos vueltos en el aire para arriba
tragaluz
desde el fondo del cielo para abajo
las nubes
su cabeza el pelo
cascaditas negras en los hombros
y en el charco de agua al final de la escalera
su cabeza
mi cabeza encima de sus hombros
reflejadas contra el piso
interminable caracol de sus pies para abajo
de mis pies para arriba
sus ojos se topan disculpe
oh no mía es la culpa estaba en el cielo
contemplando unos ojos
ella apagó su sonrisa
escondió sus ojos
y se fueron de largos sus cascadas negras
remansadas en la espalda
y se acabaron para mí las gradas
hasta olvidé donde iba
sólo sentía que iba bajando lentamente en un túnel
al otro tiempo más abajo
ella desde las gradas del jol me esperaba
nos miramos un chispazo de luz
otro chispazo de más luz
y devolvió los ojos a sus amigas
conversa sonríe
habla voltea y mira
y yo espero en suspenso su mirada
descubro en silencio el fino vuelo del mensaje de sus ojosç
de sus manos y de sus dedos
de su anillo
desde entonces han volado
muchas tardes de soles abatidos
muchas noches de lunas desgastadas
cuántas cosas han pasado desde entonces
hasta lluvias y relámpagos
despistados del invierno
algunas veces la veía en el bar
o simplemente caminando
en la vereda del parque del tránsito aéreo
muy de su marido colgado del brazo
escondiendo en los repliegues de la blusa
sus tres meses de espiga para adentro
alguna vez en el parque centenario
muy de mamá inaugurando el cochecito
an gú
an gú
an gú
mírale tiene los ojitos de ella
escamitas verdes en fondo de plata marina
profundos
alegres
inquietos y hoy la he vuelto a ver
desde una noche de verano temblorosa de frío
sol escondido detrás de sus ojos
delante del cristal oscuro
mirándome
mientras habla por teléfono
hola
yo estoy detrás de esa mole con figura de hombre
sentada delante de mis ojos
número equivocado señor
sabes te amo desde la escalera de entonces
número equivocado señor
sabes
oh dios están cruzadas las líneas
te amo desde el portal de la esquina
tú parada en las gradas mirándome
qué dice
que te amo desde la esquina de siempre
nunca
imposible soy casada
olvídelo
clip
y a mí que me importa carajo
yo sólo sé que te amo y eso basta
Pedro Lastra (Chile, 1932)
Relectura de Enrique Lihn
Porque escribí estoy vivo.
E. L.
Pero yo que no escribo,
yo que casi no tengo ya palabra,
Enrique Lihn, amigo de los mejores días
(esos que no llegaron)
qué puedo hacer por fin
para encontrar el reino que sólo el sueño crea
con la palabra que no estuvo en el sueño:
los pájaros de antaño
o una muchacha junto al jazminero
en el centro del patio, si es que hubo ese patio
y no lo inventa el otro que soy al regresar cada mañana
mi enemigo mortal, el que habita en mi casa,
el que niega y se burla
de mis pequeñas trampas de tahúr obstinado
o de aspirante al cetro de los justos,
si es que hay justicia y justos
y diluvios, con su inmortal paloma
y todo eso.
Antonio Santos Menor (España, 1943)
Vivir
Hay que gastar la vida
hasta dejarla rota,
colgarla de nosotros
como una simple prenda
y no aflojarla nunca,
aunque la moje el agua
de todas las tormentas
o las cuartee la furia
de todas las resacas.
Hay que gastar la vida
hasta volverla hilachas
y dance nuestro cuerpo
riéndole a la muerte.
Hay que gastar la vida
hasta dejarla quieta
como una leña ardida
que expira toda enclenque.
Hay que gastar la vida,
gastala a manos llenas
para que cuando llegue
la muerte a darnos guerra
no encuentre ni un resquicio
de nada para ella.
Ralph Nazareth (India, 1945)
Indio Puro
La pureza es lo que la pureza hace.
Por lo demás todo es mezcla
en los puertos en el cruce de los ríos.
Confusión de sinapsis
Enzimas mezcladas como saliva
son intercambiada entre lasrazas.
El esperma y el ovulo se mezclan
en el sueño amniótico sin importar los colores.
La pureza es lo que la muerte hace
mientras descansa en un estado sin división.
Hasta los enemigos jurados vienen
atraer coronas de flores
aunque algunos de los capullos dejen escapar
la sangre de tu clan.
Es con cierta dificultad
que digo estas palabras:
Soy indio
y deseo ser visto como tal
compuesto y descompuesto
en el encuentro y la partida de los mundos.
Juan Manuel Roca (Colombia, 1946)
Confesión de un solitario
Llevo años, buenos años, viviendo con Nadie.
Sin darme cuenta, sin hacer esfuerzos,
Me acostumbré a las costumbres de Nadie.
A punto de demandar mi atención
Ocurre que siempre se arrepiente. Quizá lo hace
Para no entrar de rondón en mis silencios.
De las lenguas de Babel
Nadie elige un habla cautelosa.
Ni siquiera cuando tropiezo y maldigo
Da muestras de sorpresa o de disgusto.
Que yo encienda la lámpara del desvelo
O entone una antigua canción en la alborada
No es motivo de molestias para Nadie.
No hace preguntas cuando regreso de viaje,
De una ciudad cuyas calles nunca desembocan
O de un crucero por las provincias del mangle.
Llevarle flores a Nadie es darle hojas al otoño,
Pues ha hecho del silencio su jardín.
Rémy Durand (Venezuela, 1946)
El hombre que llora
a G.R.
el hombre que lloraba
El hombre que llora
viste flores negras filigranas amargas
ya no tiene nombre
me llamo nadie dice
no sabe cómo se llama
no sé cómo me llamo
qué importa
olvidó quién es
¿quién soy?dice
quizás el tío ese que cruza la calle
sin brazos sin mirada
El hombre que llora
ya no puede respirar
¡aire por favor aire!dice
ni caminar tampoco andar
en su camino yacen vasijas sucias
prendas tiradas y desgarradas
vestuarios arrugados trajes sin baile
camisas manchadas con palabras vacías
un continente entero echado al suelo
floración sedientaesperanzas marchitadas
El hombre que llora
tiene ganas para nada
no quiere vestirse
¡ay! otra vez afeitarme mirarme los huesos en el espejo
los ojos sin niña mis ojos exánimes
otra vez vestirmequé putada la guerra y esos amores fantoches
qué jilipollada la San Valentín
sólo quiere vagabundear desnudo el hombre que llora
por los caminos del infierno
dices que me amas pero te vas
dices que me quieres pero no vienes
anda amor mío celestial amor bienaventurado
anda brindemos con champagne para homenajear
¡tú no te quedas y no te vas!
brindemos con champagne en ese magno día de mi cesantía
litros de champagne amor mío gloriosa deliciosa
pues me jubilas me parasme invitas a reventar
sí mi damami señorita mi señora
quédate no vengas quédate hermosa
lo sé todo eres la bella permanciente
y aquí yacen los pedazos
de tu flamante amante efímero
el que ambicionas miga de tus migajas
resíduoanda
llámame Resíduo me llamo Resíduo
un paso pa’lante dos pasos pa’trás
El hombre que llora
anda descalzo por el viento
ahí donde nadie le habla
ahí donde nadie le pregunta
¡ay! ¿cómo estás? ¿cómo andas? ¿qué te ha pasado?
pareces tristey atónito y pálido
donde nadie le habla
nadie le pregunta
¡ay! ¿cómo estás? ¿cómo andas? ¿qué te ha pasado?
El hombre que llora
piensa
llevo viento mudo
cargo nieves infieles
transbordo arenas mentirosas
me engalano con huellas y surcos
reliquiasde amores rotos¿y qué?
¿Y qué?
El hombre que llora
ya no come ya no bebe
ya no escribe sino el poema
el poema del hombre que llora
el poema del hombre que llora
y esta jodida carta de amor.
Fernando Rendón (Colombia, 1951)
Sueño que estoy soñando
Tú estás en mi sueño con tus ojos llenos de amor
Este sueño es persistente y denso
Y lo envuelve todo ondulando como el mar
Sueño que estamos abrazados al mar y que decimos disparates
Este sueño tiene propiedades específicas
Puede estirarse y no debe terminar
De los soñadores depende que sueñen los muchos que no sueñan
Sólo puede uno despertar y amar en un día abierto sin dejar de soñar
Vivir contra la muerte y luchar en duermevela
Atrayendo como un imán al tiempo que vendrá
En mi sueño la serena existencia es más real
Es preciso dar nervio a este sueño en borbotones
Porque un sueño frágil no merece soñarse
Es preciso que nos desvelemos muchas noches soñando
Mejor un sueño sin orillas en que el mundo cambia y se libera
Cada segundo una oleada del sueño
Que encara a la realidad y derriba a la muerte
Y nos vemos a nosotros mismos viviendo por primera vez
Fernando J. Elizondo-Garza (México, 1954)
Trágatelo
Trágate toda esta vida
disfruta el exterminar
probabilidades de ser
en un destino no escrito
pero que ha pasado
de generación en generación
entre privacidades
y felicidades.
Traga sin aspavientos
que no te den asco
esos registros genéticos,
que aunque fugazmente
te llenarán, pasarán
pues nada queda
más que el recuerdo.
Trágate las esperanzas
improbables de existir
en esa liberación
lúdica y gozosa
que exprimiste
de tu señor
tómate todo el flujo
y cierra el rito.
Mercedes Roffé (Argentina, 1954)
El encuentro
si me esperas
te diré
quién eres
—ábreme
no estoy del todo
muerta
soy tú
Cely Herrán (Colombia, 1957)
Escribiente
En el amanecer está el poema,
en tus ojos y risa, va la rima,
en las gotas de lluvia desgarradas,
las metáforas mojan mis premuras.
En el cielo y el mar vuelan las prisas,
en el sol y en el árbol, las medidas,
en el atardecer fluyen los días
y los versos se escapan de la lira.
Respiro versos mientras canta el orbe
y mi sangre se vuelve melodía.
Soy un ave maltrecha y bendecida,
un pequeño escribiente de la vida.
Rafael Courtoisie (Uruguay 1958)
El amor de los locos
Un loco es alguien que está desnudo de la mente. Se ha despojado de sus ropas invisibles, de esas que hacen que la realidad se vele y se desvíe. Los locos tienen esa impudicia que deviene fragilidad y, en ocasiones, belleza. Andan solos, como cualquier desnudo, y con frecuencia también hablan solos ("Quien habla solo espera hablar con Dios un día").
Más difícil que abrigar un cuerpo desnudo es abrigar un pensamiento. Los locos tienen pensamientos que tiritan, pensamientos óseos, duros como la piedra en torno a la que dan vueltas, como si se mantuvieran atados a ella por una cadena de hierro de ideas.
El cerebro de un pájaro no pesa más que algunos gramos, y la parte que modula el canto es de un tamaño mucho menor que una cabeza de alfiler, un infinitésimo trocillo de tejido, de materia biológica que, con cierto aburrimiento, los sabios escrutan al microscopio para descifrar de qué manera, en tan exiguo retazo, está escrita la partitura.
Pero desde mucho antes, y sin necesidad de microscopio ni de tinciones, el loco sabe que el canto del pájaro es inmenso y pesado, plomo puro que taladra huesos, que se mete en el sueño, que desfonda cualquier techo y no hay cemento ni viga que pueda sostener su hartura, su tamaño posible. Por eso algunos locos despiertan antes de que amanezca y se tapan los oídos con su propia voz, con voces que sudan de adentro, de la cabeza.
Los pensamientos del loco son carne viva, carne sin piel. En el desierto del pensamiento del loco el pájaro es un sol implacable. El canto cae como una luz y un calor que le picara al loco en la carne misma de la desnudez.
Pero la desnudez del loco es íntima: de tanto exhibirla queda dentro. Es condición interior, pasa desapercibida a las legiones de cuerdos cuya ánima está cubierta por completo de tela basta, gruesa, trenzada por hilos de la costumbre.
El único instrumento posible para el loco, para defender su desnudez, es el amor. El amor de los locos es una vestimenta transparente. Esos ojos vidriosos, ese hilo ambarino que orinan por las noches, ese fragor y ese sentimiento copioso y múltiple que no alteran las benzodiazepinas, que no disminuye el Valium, permanecen intactos en el loco por arte del amor.
Es un martillo, y una cuchara, y un punzón. Es todo menos un vestido, no cubre sino que atraviesa, no mitiga sino que exalta. El amor de los locos tiene una textura, un porte y una sustancia.
La sustancia se parece al vidrio, pero es el vidrio de una botella rota.
Galo Guerrero Jiménez (Loja, 1959)
Esperando a alguien
Desde la profunda oquedad del tiempo
me consumen tus noches de miel
en cada estación de la vida.
Yrene Santos (República Dominicana, 1963)
Rejuego
Un rejuego
una reacción
muere tu lengua al tocarme
se dilata la tinta del deseo
calcinando los cinco puntos de tu cara
Risas
silencios
resuenan en el oído izquierdo de la alcoba.
Ramiro Caiza (Machachi, 1963)
Despertar
Desplomado yace el pensamiento
entre pasajes deshabitados que dilatan
la conjunción de las voces que den vida
al timonel de palabras emergentes
irradia el engendro en mil formas
parpadean vestigios de vocablos rotos
que musitan configurar la lengua
en un compendio de trasnochadas voces
un fino susurro golpea en la mente
perfora las barreras con sigilo menguante
suelta las severas riendas a tiempo
la lectura del día se levanta temprano.
Marianela Medrano (República Dominicana, 1964)
De Brujas y Mariposas
Está bien
Sentémonos a definir
Pitágoras creía en la reencarnación
-yo creo en él-
Entonces él es el gusano azul de las calladas tardes
que se enreda en mi falda
muerde la pulpa suave
Créanmelo es el que viene a mi convertido en gusano
¿Y yo?
Soy la voz de donde comienzan a salir los pájaros
-antes fui callada mariposa deformada en las paredes-
Posterior a eso fui dragón que sorbió su propio fuego
Cómo me gocé las llamas
En el espejo de las brasas encontré la clave
la que olvidó Dios cuando hizo el mundo
(debo decir cuando el mundo lo hizo a él)
Pobrecito anda ciego buscándose el rostro
No nos perdamos Volvamos a la rueda
En otro punto
Cabizbaja asintiendo
Ocupé una silla en la conferencia de los apóstoles
Aves de presagios comenzaron a revolotear en el techo
Ciérrense ojos
ábranse piernas
el silencio se derrama entre las bocas
salpicando almohadas de piedra
Dije mujer
y todos los rostros se volvieron
las espadas se hundieron hasta quebrar mi cerviz
Bajaron en trocitos las hijas del amor
las hermanas
-las hermosas calaveras de las novias con ramos de azahares-
Vuelvo el rostro hacia esta parte
Los clavos comienzan a salir
Ah…porque soy Cristo
¿Entienden ahora el misterio de su ruego en la cruz?
¿Padre por qué me has abandonado?
Y me volvió a nacer a este dolor de vida
a esta hambre a esta sed que no se sacia
Esta vez con un armazón de piano
El circulo del piano el anillo de la música
-la orgía mayor de los ángeles entre mis piernas-
Sentadita en las sombras brindé
con el néctar de mi propia sangre
sangre de madera ésta que duele
Pasado un tiempo el teclado tomó mudez de estatua
Entonces fue preciso hacerme yo
El circulo hecho por mi
el del timón el de las batallas crudas
y los oleajes que matan
Ay la batalla de los campos fríos
la lucha del sol y de la luna
A esta ceremonia vinieron los jueces
Con risitas de medio lado
Ya saben los sabios los triunfadores
Me negué a ser el astro y escupí sus caras
-Fue como pasar la caricia sobre jardín de espinas-
Desnuda me echaron de nuevo al fuego
Vengan a la fiesta de la bruja
la que come lagartos para asustar imbéciles
fermenta astros de visión para gozarse
relamiéndose los labios
La de la boca de fresas y saliva agria
que conocer el arte de la muerte
La que a pincelazos de insomnio abre una ruta
Animando con canciones el aquelarre
Fiesta de lluvias truenos y relámpagos
Radiografiando su praxis
-reinvención del mundo mundo
mundo de ojos que no se cierran
de brazos abarrotando calles
Es posible una generación de locos
que coman mariposas silabeen ruiseñores
inventando el modo de engendrar el sol y la luna
La reestructuración integral del universo
en ella la semilla del nuevo ser que sobreviva a la luz.
Mariana Vacs (Argentina, 1967)
Sirena
Dentro del cenote,
tu cuerpo es sirena y canta.
Escucho tus melodías de infancia,
no es desaire mi mudez,
es que el aire hace rondas en la memoria
y me estaca
Tergel Khulganai (Mongolia, 1971)
Naturaleza humana
Enfocarte solo en tu propia imagen
En una foto en companía
Amarla solo, cuando tu propia imagen parece perfecta
No importa si los otros parecen bizcos
La imagen es perfectamientras tu propia imagen lo sea
Así es la naturaleza humana
Haces un brindis y la pasas bien
Tu amigo a tu lado paga la cuenta
Tú disfrutas en silencio esa alegría aquel momento
Secretamente tocando
Tus bolsillos con billetes sin pagar
Feliz más alla de ti mismo por
Tener fiesta gratuita
La naturaleza universal
de nosotros los humanos…
Alguien es miserable, violentado y herido
Busca de ti como consuelo solo tenerte para
Dejar un consejo sin importancia para ignorarlo todo
Pero, cuando llega a casa
Todos tus cabellos de punta
Aparentemente porque tus problemas son lo peor
Es extrana la naturaleza humana
Oh, negro; gris, blanco y rojo
Tantos notables colores de la naturaleza humana
Algo que no puede ser tocado, tomado o suavizado
Tal es la naturaleza humana…
oh, la naturaleza de los hombres.
Diana Araujo Pereira (Brasil, 1972)
De Otras palabras/Outras palavras (RJ: 7Letras, 2008)
Extenderse a otros cuerpos, a otras almas, a otros corazones. En la completud añorada de formar mapas humanos, geografías armónicas, complicidad renombrada. Nombrarse al nombrar al otro, éste que tanta falta nos hace en la escala estrepitosa de vivir en el aire. Estirarse en otros para completar la frase, para hacerse sentido y sintaxis humana. Lo humano es salirse para los nombres ajenos, para configurarse un poco más a cada paso. Embeberse en otras letras y sonidos.
Tocar al otro, olerlo, vaciarse y volver a llenarse en la amistad o el odio. Signos contrarios de la misma e intrínseca necesidad angustiante. Odiar al otro es odiarse a si mismo por la incapacidad de ser entero.
Sonreír la sonrisa ajena, llorar sus mismas lágrimas: grados de composición de un poema común.
Amar al otro es la máxima poesía.
Carolina Zamudio (Argentina, 1973)
Mis muertos
Llevo mis muertos vivos en mí.
Vienen de mañana a extasiarse en mi mano
cuando acarician luminosos
las frentes de mis hijas. Uno mira al espejo
en mis ojos
de un pardo más ocre que verdoso
asomando enigmático por los párpados caídos
de otro muerto que vive en mí
hasta que la muerte nos separe.
Mayda Colón (Puerto Rico, 1975)
Madre:
voy en el tren y parece una forma ideal
para abrigarse contra el rencor del invierno.
Escribo porque me proporciona la certeza
del movimiento en los cartílagos de las manos
como si para morir la historia redundara en el retorno de la afrenta
en el enumeramiento en singular de esas cosas sencillas
que nos obligan a los gestos débiles,
a la certeza de la sombra bajo la sombra
o al coloquio del espejo prohibido
que se cuece en los años bisiestos.
Voy muriendo
y presiento que me requedo en las caras
en los recuentos de los tantos nombres incomprensibles
entre las páginas huérfanas que se teje el aguacero para inmolarse finalmente
en la certeza de los charcos.
Muero de mí
muero de este suicidio lento de voz que me arrastra a la dulzura absoluta del compendio
muero de las voces en la conciencia de tantos poetas escasos ya de brazos
hambrientos como lobos feroces de la siniestra transfusión de la tinta.
Muero rabiando de vida y descalza
muero lento, pero todo está en orden y dispuesto para esos monólogos meninos
que dicen que calman, pero infestan como a los lienzos las pinturas.
Ando la ciudad; Madre, como a la hierba,
con los ojos
ando y mientras muero
la inmensidad del cielo no descansa en su labor de trastocar azules para pintar el mar.
El mar habla tanto, Madre.
Yo escribo.
María Solís Munuera (España, 1976)
Un hombre que huye
Quiero un lugar benévolo: el mercado de pescado de Oslo. Quiero llegar de noche, de la madera, el traje, la piel negra, con la tripulación desaparecida y el capitán atado a los timones. En las mesas, las lámparas recubren con tungsteno la falsa melancolía de los peces. Los noruegos, proteínicos, se elevan. Los niños llevan los sombreros de paja y los anillos. Compraré la botella de pelo rubio. Como ellos, quiero dejar vivir a las abejas. Como ellas, quiero
el círculo amarillo con el círculo negro. La celda cuando se acaba el día. Cansarme de matar habiéndolo probado. La protección monárquica e inclinar la botella y derramar la miel sobre la falsa melancolía de los peces. El lujo y la vejez tienen tonos dorados. En el cabello, el amarillo es el siguiente paso de lo blanco. Él
dice lo que hay: asilo político. Canastas de mimbre para los refugiados. Cereales. Cajones para peces en venta con el precio. Botellas con forma de balanza. Hay pelotas de tenis. Hay cítricos. Hay sopa. Optimismo. Gente de teatro. Luz. Granos de mostaza. Hay un nivel de vida. Hay mujeres que paren como reinas. Casi el récord de muertes por maltrato. Dice.
La mesa del almuerzo
Tiene algo de autopsia
la mesa del almuerzo
donde los hombres juegan
a tener importancia.
La precisión del corte, de la hora, del castigo
a la hija,
a la pornografía de la masticación.
La urbanidad, silencio
de tres.
Impolutos los dedos y el mantel,
su función es cubrir los genitales.
Los labios no rozan la comida,
en la boca no pueden quedar restos.
La piel no se arranca con las manos.
Se interpone el metal.
Rafael Méndez Meneses (Ecuador, 1976)
Misstep
I am the wrong step
whom you did not love
hurry up
the fever that did not subside
the wound that began to ooze
but it doesn't hurt anymore
by sheer inertia
because deep down one day
you hope to show me scar
trout medal
memorable battle
Incidental observation error
I almost see you in the crowd
I almost forgot
It is almost worth me mothers to go back to zero pages
I almost regret it
of wanting to arrive
undead to devour you
You almost won me
I almost relapsed
almost
but it wasn't you
Siomara Spain (Ecuador, 1976)
Mother
I who learned the love of armchairs
and I skipped the alphabet between a hundred names
I who learned to count among the stones
and I tamed the language on the covers.
Why do I swap myself verse by verse?
Why, mother, didn't you give me the first litany
ordinary syllables?
And suckled stanzas that stab like daggers
why did you instruct me in repertoires
and you did not fill with rosaries, this body on fire.
Because you gave me the dementia between the lines
and you sprinkled the first laughs with stories
why mother don't you kiss me
and we barter with hugs
so much nothing.
Return to Freud
There is nothing more beautiful or more fertile than anguish
nothing is more beautiful than staging the anguish
between two bodies that break
between two cities
grief holds
between the face bruised by the cold
and the sun that dazzles and everything burns.
Nothing is more beautiful or more fertile than anguish
hand outstretched in the corners
from the cold in the portals
of the women who sell
between gloomy bedrooms
their bruised bodies,
and the other ones
those of the daily bread in the recalcitrant sweat of grief
those in skirts dragging the dust from the streets like tongues,
those of the load on the shoulder
and instant meals
invented for crying.
Those of the impalpable coturn,
the light and neat office
old women in pain
for being the shadow of another shadow.
There is nothing more beautiful or more fertile than anguish
because in any theater
beauty is measured by tables,
by the three quarters of light
scattered on the chest of the one who dies
because the theater and the applause
daily they light the bonfire of being,
the uchrony as an eternal possibility of the one who waits
and the entelechy of not being
as the only possibility of life or death.
Xavier Hidalgo Cedeño (Ecuador, 1977)
Devoured ribs
Welcome
Misfits
Fear not
We just don't belong
They point out:
Their hell devours them
While we live our paradise
We are the disorder that upset its perfection.
We vibrate inside the bell
we cannot contain ourselves
Iván Trejo (Mexico, 1978)
7
they buried
standing / didn't know until
then / they wanted their weight to fall on their feet
unmade / collapsing
and end up sitting as if resting
something / nobody warned / no questions
did / my father had
crooked feet and on them
they buried him / he didn't like to wait
and I was buried standing up.
María Auxiliadora Balladares (Ecuador, 1980)
Hospital
The scales on the skin
They will disappear with lasers
I'll polish the fangs
Until giving them the shape
Which corresponds
With a human jaw
We'll cut the nails
With pliers if necessary
The spine will straighten
With a corset
Of metal rods
I will wash the body
And again
Until every vestige of animality
Has disappeared
We will detangle the hair
With aggressive treatments
That remove lice and nits
Crabs and parasites will disappear
I will control the digestion
With diets
Laxatives
Or enemas
We will repeat to infinity
The procedures
Get used to white
From the walls
From the sheets
Will embrace hygiene in the long run
You will learn to like the silence
Electroshocks will do their job
With thoughtful stimuli
I will fine-tune his clumsy gestures
I will teach you to always look straight ahead
Verónica Aranda (Spain, 1982)
Maps
I consulted the maps
with a rain forest on the retina,
and left his mark
on the shutters.
If the compasses failed,
if in a burning of lime the light blinded him,
she took the risk of getting trapped
in a foreign city.
Felipe López (Colombia, 1985)
Someone had delusions about the Chimborazo, and I celebrate it with flowers that limit the mountain ranges of warrior souls
I accompany the delirious who dare to pulverize themselves, the wise men, the taitas, the potato, the cassava, the tubers that found their home in these lands
Delirious with every speck of dust that enters the windows, because they are the vestiges
From the mountain ranges, from the dead skin of jaguars, to the blood of the sad Night
A courage, and delirium before the beauty, delirium before the horror, for the lands that deify Bachué, have chosen the ruffian, the pirate, and the chains
But every cell makes me proud, even my canine teeth, molars, are rinsed
of the cane that raves in the tropics, the liquid that is born of the moors puffs up,
the longboat that sets sail in the confines of the Amazon, the poppy that shakes the subsoil
You have to be in the prisons of the jungle and say that this is true
Delirium before America, because we crazy climbs in the ceibas, we apnea in the Rio de la Plata, we go beyond the dimension and divinity in the taste of ayahuasca, delirious before pillows that dream of springs in Lost City
Refuge from delusions who believe in the impossible
Yenny León (Colombia 1987)
From Between Trees and Stones (2013)
Yeti, not all words
sentenced to death.
Wislawa Szymborska
the girl sinks
in the fourth longest silence on earth
spend the day
locked in a bubble of fire
the yeti shakes
to the tiny circle
leaves traces of rust
the stone is silent
against the rain.
Irina Henríquez (Colombia, 1988)
Finding
My way of waiting for something to happen is obsessive. Let the beast that hides behind the undergrowth of the day's events jump on me. But I do not wait for more than a few seconds: I wish to be found while searching or celebrating a wrong finding.
.
And the best way to find it is by being immobile while everything rotates or the bells ring: the world is then all the things that sooner or later are camouflaged under the appearance of the everyday. I desire the tide of images that remain after each movement in the finest meshes of the air. I wish to possess what you look at without knowing, all the things that in the name of chance have remained consigned in the nothingness of abandonment. Because you didn't realize it, because the hawk is the owner of his complaint but he does not know that it has reached me, because it is in the world and it is my find.
.
Antonio Preciado Bedoya (Ecuador, 1941)
.
Neptune
.
I'm here
to defend my snail
that, for any slightest oversight
(after huddled
next to him in his shell
all those millennia,
all the themes,
all the languages;
and behind all the seas
and all the hangovers
and all the tides
And everything else
that with him in the seas it was),
the terrifying moment takes place
in which, among all the certainties
and everything inside
that all the time the snail has said,
somehow,
finally,
let all the silences invade it.
Know well that, for him,
I go from wave to wave
flying a fierce seaweed in the winds;
so no diver
and no captain
will tie my tongue
in which I have engraved my wishes.
Leave it as it is, I'm always awake!
And know that if the sea,
the same sea,
on the contrary, it covers me
the endearing truth of the snail
with its rumblings,
I will do in my own palms, with my teeth,
two gentle seas
and I will make them tell me
to the ear,
stay, the word I want.
Jean Portante (Luxembourg, 1950)
.
I speak of a time when IN THE KITCHEN
less flour was made than powder.
of the whiteness of before they were only
the broken cups and the coffee pot of time:
I mean: living there was an incessant
swaying from one spider web to another.
when the call came it took the form
of a mermaid.
in the factory of memories it was enough
unhitch or hitch some wagons.
the rest: I mean: what was done was not
far from there he counted neither the dead nor the living when
after the soldiers passed they were missing in the
drawers forks and knives: I mean:
what was eaten then had passed through the mirror
and he never gave us the sign to join him.
Ibsen Manzano (Ecuador, 1951)
Death was frustrated
(To my beloved sister Elina)
She has not died
she just fell asleep
between his multiple daily chores.
She didn't leave
they took her,
they put the coins in his eyes
and they pushed their canoe to shore.
She did not go to infinity,
because it was eternal like time,
because time was eternal like her.
They took her out of my sight
without foam or coral paths,
without nurses to raise their lamps,
without telling me that he's gone.
She was the generous laugh,
the most fixed point of support,
the sound of solidarity without distinction,
victory renewed.
Today I feel it between my fingers,
between the yellow pages of the texts
or the breeze that hits my senses.
She has not died
she just fell asleep.
Rubén Medina (Mexico, 1955)
Case in point
In a congress
of Mexican feminists
and chicanas in Mexico City,
Cherríe Moraga, author of
Loving in the war years:
what never passed your lips
and The last generation,
stated:
"If my grandparents had not
gone from Mexico ago
fifty years,
I would now be one of his
maids ”
There was silence
furtive glances,
momentary regret
for having invited her,
short conversations
on other topics
practical and
more or less related
with the meeting,
but for the next few days
the real dialogue
would go on now
inside.
Keijiro Suga (Japan, 1958)
two
On the other coast, the western one, an ancient forest is buried,
Since the last ice age, the flood, oblivion and the peat stratum.
Now, everything is exposed on the cliffs on this shore.
Having witnessed the sun for twenty thousand years,
And for twenty thousand years, the wind and meteor falls,
The roots of the trees, keeping their shape,
Sleep and waking alternate vaguely.
The water oozes from the cliffs,
That from time to time becomes a stream and shakes my heart.
“Besides, what do we know? How far can we progress? "
I never imagined that I thought of this lament of Goethe,
In this thing where the letters in Hangeul and Russian are scattered.
With the transparent salty water of the waves of the sea,
I wash a wounded apple and bite into it.
In the shadows of the white foamy waves
They reflect a serene smile of love.
Alvaro Inostroza Bidart (Chile, 1960)
in memoriam
I was not lucky
to meet Bolaño
but I did meet Armando Rubio
to Rodrigo Lira
to Juan Luis Martínez
to Enrique Lihn
to Jorge Teillier
to Rolando Cárdenas
it's not bad to cry sometimes
you have to be good little man
in the sixties
-the prodigious decade-
we grew up under the sky of utopia
history led us by the hand
in the seventies
we sat at the table
we daydream
we woke up to a nightmare
in the eighties
the best was poetry
friendship action
we share the streets
the bars we talk
of the return of life
in the nineties
music entered air
we had the last children
we keep crying sometimes
we launched fireworks
in the new millennium
we went back to the perimeter
we distance ourselves from power
we look for our own center
enthusiasm launches its last rockets
death stops being romantic
our children take off
we hate speeches
friends return
work is synonymous with will
yearning to retire
of public ambitions
I was not lucky enough to meet Bolaño
but we are still here drifting away
of the lights of the crowd
negotiating accountability
the limits of the lands
the safe conduct the visa
but never the word
the memory
.
Elizabeth Cazessús (Mexico, 1960)
Angel / light
Gravity is not earth-kissing torture.
Lezama Lima
Angel / light I
In a few moments, the nature of things
it will record its echo in the shells,
the mountains will lose their shape,
the river will melt into the shade.
They will wander like you and me without the harassment of uncertainty.
Planets will wake up dead in light years,
we will argue to be image and likeness,
revelation of dust,
suppressed attempt at survival.
We will be a walk of reflections that do not touch.
Javier Bozalongo (Spain, 1961)
Donor card
I have donated my body
to a medical school.
I wish there are still many years to go
until a student's scalpel
may know more about me than myself,
and just in case one of my organs works
I leave here some clues
of what they will find inside me.
The tips of my fingers will keep the memory
of who wanted to be caressed;
the palms of my hands never got tired
to applaud a new dawn every day;
elbows were not seriously injured
Except for the sweet pain of picking up the books;
my shoulders always bore their just burden.
In my head everything I learned fit,
in my eyes the light of their glances
and on my tongue the taste of some kisses.
When darkness reigns when I open my chest
it will be for two reasons:
by the countless smoke of the wounded smoker
and by small clots grown in my veins
when the enemies shot,
but they will also see a heart
who loved how much they can be hospitable.
And not a trace of the soul.
On my legs rests a world map
for which I go and return.
My feet better leave them,
I will need them to run away
of the gloomy autopsy hospital.
Fool me, give my body to science
when I have always wanted to give it to the fire!
César Rodríguez Diez (Mexico, 1967)
(OF PHENOMENA)
Tearing the flower
I
I leave this flower for you to do with it what you like.
Smother it, caress it.
It is everything that I could not be.
Useless homeland.
Hollowed out marrow.
Your hand is holding it with suspicious intent.
Everything else is stem
Thorn
shroud.
II
Leafless flower without communion possible
bursts at every step
like a narrow street
under the enigma.
III
I plucked your petals.
I wanted to feel what burst fragile.
An eye for an eye I poked at your pallor.
Deflowered groan.
Curiosity of a monster in rough night.
IV
Irreparable lack embedded deep within
where something shakes us. A name.
Kingdom numb in the look I crush.
Ely Rosa Zamora (Venezuela, 1967)
I'm here. In this room, no view
A hand comes in to steal my guts
On the train, a woman slaps a child
There are ropes coming through the window to strangle me
They are not bushes
I touch my belly frayed in syrup
Blood gushing from the side of my eye
The incomprehensible has turned into a smile
what is calling me
I'm no more what I can't shake over time
I have closed the doors to take care of my garden
I spit a long snake, which I pull from my mouth
My mother stayed in the dream fanning a rose
dead
Like colored fruits
I listen to the silence when I chew the sore of boredom in my mouth
A ballerina without legs takes the stage
Ireland's lost giant hands over his prosthetics
Sometimes I don't remember how I got to this place
A two-headed King holds crosses aloft
Let's get the monsters out of the sore mouth!
These goblins of the tongue are not eternal
I have no more protection
this numb hangover
in my battered lilies.
Scarecrow from my garden
Jump!
From the book, The Sharpness of the Funnel, Newmark Press, New York, 2015
Faiza Sultan (Iraq, 1971)
Poems:
Let's give war a chance
1
Love can walk
Barefoot, calling out
The doors of the ditches.
two
Butterflies can use
chest armor
At the door of every rose.
3
The sun can undress
his teeth
And the night can burn.
.
Mónica González Velázquez (Mexico, 1973)
THE PERSISTENCE OF THE LOOK
Everything that does not have a goal to achieve,
a result to be conquered, an enigma to be solved,
a mystery to penetrate, I am not interested.
Pablo Picasso
0.1
Vincent sunflowers-vertigo
dawn-magenta in Arles.
Starry Night Blue Dynamo:
shines in the sky.
0.2
His fists curled with anger.
Portrait with a stylized neck and topped with a bonnet.
In all Jeanne fabrics, the crystalline eyes of cloudy blue.
Caryatids surround the mausoleum.
0.3
"But one day they gave me a pencil and with my arm outstretched, I began to measure reality."
Santiago, the canvases with ocher veins and shades of subtle gold.
The gaze bifurcates on the horizon: all fair proportion.
0.4
In chiaroscuro the foreshortenings are outlined.
Long Dark Mane Maja
a leeward steed.
Goya, from the firmament a ceiling.
0.5
Kandinsky spiritual in art,
the point on the plane and the line:
the color palette towards the abstract universe.
0.6
Pollock splatter hard face
and of abstract brilliance in free space:
that stain comes to life.
0.7
Bosco-forest of delights
(the ugly, the sublime, the grotesque).
Nightmares, sublimation of the beautiful: landscapes.
0.8
Critical-paranoid method, secretes irony.
"Perverse polymorphous, lagging and anarchist", or "soft, weak and repulsive."
Amalgam of obsessions: Eugenio Salvador Dalí.
.
John Burns (United States, 1977)
Literary basketball
William Blake pulls an orange out of a Cézanne still life and tosses it across midfield, on a scoring pass to Allen Ginsberg. Leonard Cohen's throw-in for Aristophanes, who hangs a bulky fake phallus from his shorts to distract the other team, but turns out to distract his teammate Erica Jong more. Pass from Aristophanes to Jong, but Sappho, who doesn't care about her, steals the ball. Anne Sexton teaches him a little leg from the wing and Dante manages to steal the ball from Sappho, and immediately hits a triple. He remains praising the grace of his feat, noting that the arc of the ball's trajectory is only lower than the curve of Beatriz's chest, so that the player who defended him, Matsuo Basho, goes from coast to coast, although He breaks the three-second rule, comparing the area of the area with his cabin in Edo. Sitting on the bench, WH Auden frowns and wonders "Where the hell is Edo?" Robert Graves jumps off the opposite bench and yells at him, "You won't find it on a map today, you idiot, it's what they called Tokyo before 1868." They confront and exchange insults such as "pygmy", "ogre" and "egocentric word player". As they argue, the coaches, Homer and Enheduanna, make a few substitutions so that some of the already weary performers can drink some wine from the Gatorade jug. The game starts again and there is a jump between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Tolstoy wins the ball. Tolstoy's side pass to Czeslaw Milosz who returns it to Leon, who in turn feints to Dostoevsky before passing it to Fredy Nietzsche, who watches Yeats intentionally foul Whitman. The German is left traumatized and gives him for raving, throws the ball into the air and runs off without any direction. William Stafford, the pacifist poet, takes the ball and stays with it in midfield, declaring that he will not participate in any act of violence, before entering a deep state of meditation. Hemingway rips one eye out of the portrait of Gertrude Stein painted by Picasso and the game is on again ...
.
Marco Antonio Gabriel (Mexico, 1977)
Trapeze artist
The times that I have been wrong
trying to vary the course of the river
have been the most.
Now i bring a ghost
hanging from the left arm
all the rains I have put into it.
A little dying
like an aerialist,
spreads its dragonfly arms,
looks at me from the side
and knows that the fall is imminent.
He is a young river wolf,
knows about the game
that devours and maintains life.
Like a suicide without a vocation
abyss clown:
I have put all the rains in it.
Elsye Suquilanda (Ecuador, 1979)
A Shabbat with Lemed
You feel the energy flowing freely
you get entangled in a crystal sheet,
You run, you go up, you go down,
Picturesque beings adorn your head with flowers.
From a curtain down the steps of history and charm that come together in a space as if you were a gnome in a fairy tale; from the window I see the Indonesian puppets when she smiles with her eyes pure like the hair of a tender carnation,
while sipping a bite of vodka from a glass adorned with Illinizas stones and blue-eyed snails.
Friday is no longer just any day ... it is a Shabbat with her, the one that begins when the sun goes down. An aura of mystery brings us to Lemed, a letter of the Hebrew alphabet that means “to learn”; For me, it is learning to paint sunsets and flashes of absolute permanence in a space caged in destruction, learning to love.
Tin roofs shake before you
the ants,
the goddesses bees,
the malignant tumors of society kneel for you, the sun dries up, the tears lighting up your room, your refuge full of abstract and concrete paintings like the pieces of that ogre's chess when he got them so as not to die.
Night lights,
complete pieces of your harmony,
now you play with the smoke,
you give your breast to your children in the gallery of perfect concretization.
When the sun goes back to hide another night is blurred between your beloved illusions
(You …… .The queen of an abstract world)
Isabel Dunas (Colombia, 1982)
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!
Match the nature of change
live in the immediacy.
No mysteries, no speculation,
let me go like a river.
This is how life should be.
Knowing how to leave behind,
know how to be everything
to be unknown without pain,
no regrets.
And let's not say more than time will tell,
time says nothing.
It is ours to say, it is ours to enumerate.
Now,
I just want to see the bird go by
feel the sun that warms me,
the water that wets me,
my daughter's kiss.
Andrea Crespo Granda (Ecuador, 1983)
ROOM 2 REGISTRATION
But if this is so, the ravens hallucinate in the wastelands, and the pincers of a specter embrace the enclosure;
but if this is so,
it is due to a distortion of breath,
so we will take a drug, a platinum ideology that can rub our hypoglossal nerve.
(HERE GET UP AND CRY, CRY WOODS AND REMEMBER 8 YEARS OLD SMELLS)
The bones piled up in the dock, the testicle of the merchant ship shaking the nightmare of the aguaje and its crests of glances. God sinks his gospel in our breasts, sinks his grace in each No, in each fraudulent failure and that is how your hair is imposed on the tragedy of the flame, the silence of the cave where you persist, millions of ages, until you are the predator of the galaxy.
(HERE TO GET TOGETHER AND SMOKE YOUR WOODS AND REMEMBER SMELLS OF THE FIRST SEXUAL INTERCOURSE)
The moth-corroded quicial. The logic of Turing uncorking parallel universes, the dimensions of all our years are condensed in a stain on the ceiling of the family home. And in an accident (geological?) Your youth murders your parents, cuts their lungs and plugs their legs in inquisitive punishment.
Your youth, girl, bleeds your mother's spleen, suffocates your uncles' pancreas; it compresses the photo of the ancestors, leaves the buried ones in a state of syncope.
(HERE TO APLAUD AND CRY AND SMOKE THE MEMORY OF THE UNNEWABLE GAMES, THE TORTURES TO THE FIRST FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD)
Now you remember those spears that you sent against the souls of other children,
the women you left waiting at the cinematheque or the summer bookstore.
Now shame is your cellmate and you owe her the tally for each year.
But there's no way you're warm
and yet this day you will be kept in the glory of every river.
.
what you won't have,
pricks your breath in the mornings /
what you won't have,
sleep on the sign of your blood.
Tamara Mejía Molina (Ecuador, 1987)
I am a broken doll
With warm sex, thinking of that almost friend, almost lover. How prevalent is the company, the nights of triumphs are nothing without a good ass to hug at dawn.
Locked in time. It's true, I cling to the past, not to forget this and that; Sometimes, like now, I go with anyone that I didn't get to know, I spit on them and tied me to their sex for a few hours. Then I punish myself.
I would like to see your sad, dull eyes and love them for the seconds leading up to our ataraxia.
I want to fly among liquids, I want to swim among its most secret scents, I want to be the owner and queen of its laments and tears. Let him learn in a strong way what it is to know that he is desired.
Men underestimate desire. The woman underestimates sex. Desire is everything, move legs, soak gonads and spray pride.
We only get pleasure from humiliating those who really matter to us.
Then make perverted love to her.
Monica Ojeda Franco (Ecuador, 1988)
FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE CREATURE WITHOUT A FACE
The broken world
Like when an ocean with the blood of my brothers rained on my broad spine and I raised my consciousness towards the center of the mirror. This is how I learned to breathe spring under the open skin of those who once loved me, and I said that no image or smell or articulated sound could ever make me feel what it was like to break on top of something alive | no word could communicate the sense of fragility falling on the force and bathing it with that which makes it strong: the weakness of the petals burning the sky, the roots of the lightning embodying the tree. All the brutality was in the life that was tenderness impounded in violence, that is why the world was splitting like the teeth of a house buried in the wound of a child.
Leira Araújo (Ecuador, 1990)
.
I'll call you blue
I'll call you blue
by the calm sea that you carry behind your eyes
for the sand that covered your childhood
for the desolation you miss on a black plank
One day you will see my river
I have filled it with fish and stakes
that run to your mouth
I have drunk the water so that they can, at last, pronounce themselves
Thanks to the promise
to the pact to take care of the night
for the rest of the days
when time empties us
we can still live
kissing under the cement.
Alexandra Espinosa (Colombia, 1995)
I just need the right reason, and I will
Like when I turned twenty I thought my brain had started to die
stop speaking clearly,
now everything that I can't communicate to my parents
and what I can not communicate to my friends
and what I cannot communicate to the idiotsavants who hear me from their seats
in the stalls with their hungry ears
and what I can't say to my old classmates
who listen from their constructive silence
while they think of an important phrase to say
to kill anything stupid I explain
because they don't feel like their brain stops
but they believe that it continues
and they don't look for proof every day
and they don't get up like I get up and look at their feet dangling from the huge lonely bed
while wondering how many cells die at that precise moment.
All the things I had to say to the person I am interested in loving
all the things I had to say in a long line at customs
and all the things I had to write in a white box
all the things I had to talk about
all the garbage accumulated and rearranged
And all the conspiracy theories I had to make public in front of a friend or two
since I no longer have any of that,
because now all the time I think my IQ drops
and my brain prefers to be stunned and the light no longer collides inside
then i come here,
and i wish you could see my face while i say i'm not cut out for this
and that I must understand quickly
that the path I chose was not the one
and I must do it today because time seems to move too violently
always forward,
and i must
I SHOULD!
reconfigure all the uncertainty and make it seem like a single dream,
much more correct than the previous one,
But I really don't want to, I really prefer my old dream
Madeline Durango (Ecuador, 1995)
The raw truth is not found in what you see
Is under your skin
Beyond the bones
And your blood
It is in the intimacy of the intention
The truth revealed by your mouth
Or embodied in ink on paper
The raw truth is you
And my mind does not resign, nor lives, nor dies,
Nor does it rest,
He stands in nowhere, waiting for you to rescue me.
Virna Teixeira (Fortaleza, Brazil, 1971)
.
MEMORY LOST
Thirtieth Floor: See the city at night. Deletion of files, memories. Some were twisted in thought like the building, with Gothic windows. Captivity. Cinema Voltaire.
On the windowsill, an orchid. Isolated against twilight, violet. The erased outline of the buildings.
A sunny day. Couples stroll in the park. They walk among geese. Children play in the sandy pond.
Hippocampus, strangeness of images. Corners, forks. As if I had never, so many times, walked there.
Translation: Jair Cortés and Berenice Huerta
.
.
Valeria Meiller (Argentina, 1985)
.
.
WATERY
*
During a flood, the strongest
they meet up in a tree.
With water everywhere, the family on the roof.
Make a boat out of the bed leg. A sheet candle.
The first solution is to climb. Transparent,
parents, grandparents and pregnancies.
The kids on the roof sucking
their ration of bone they ask
Where will the sun be? And they phosphoresce.
Others flourish as well. Transparent children are born in the rain.
The midwife swimming
assists mothers without providing. A dog follows her.
The youngest stick out their tongues and drink the rain.
Many drops is male, so they choose a name.
*
After a week of rain, a head
it is yellow rennet. Twenty heads, a sulfur mine.
Sour milk sadness makes you cry
not even swallowing a bone is going to save the shine.
.
.
.
Luis Aguilar (Mexico, 1969)
.
.
TOUCH
.
Glare that goes astray, barely
Gone among the gone, a man
it's a hesitant second
Absorbed in the little touch:
Eyes on yours
Any life that goes on forever
even if it fails to register memory
.
Liyanis González Padrón (Cuba, 1971)
.
KONSTANTIN KAVAFIS
Spectral poet
.
You sink into my dream
drawing a circle on the page
Rodrigo Morales (Chile, 1980)
.
.
THE DIVER
.
.
The glass fabrics hang from the sky and it is as if hunger does not exist on top of this boat you are left looking at me as if I were a provincial cinema luminary or a small accordion abandoned in a corridor I know it hurts to lick the winter when I tell you take care I do not want you to give up like those birds that only seek a temperate place those schizophrenic birds with psychotic song in the word heaven I walk through the little sea house making gestures that I will forget in a couple of minutes while you braid a girl the clouds indicate a certain type of tragedy such as slamming a window or breaking a wave near those girls in paradise sea lilies sail cramped eyes that are drawn barefoot among the algae while I dance in a small raft that nails its rosary in the seas of the air but life is nothing more than a puppet show that is later left abandoned in a fourth an amancay adorns the blouse of a girl about to speak while the cholgas are heard opening in the fire someone declares himself to one side of the garden here there are no gardens but the words are heard passing mute through the desert I think of simple things a butterfly black perched on a fox's ear butterflies that go to the sea and then die behind the waves the sun is disfigured in the mouth of a purple fish among the rocks the cacti small christs of the place they see the dead fish pass towards the town I wake up under water crucified in the desert when there in the dim light of the distance a man like me cries out for defeat and presents himself.
Roy Dávatoc (Peru, 1981)
.
.
Denials
.
.
I've never received a love letter
completed a crossword,
or made rings with cigarette smoke
I have never understood questions of optics
neither pastry nor navigation
But I imagine there is a point where the water loses
its unnatural consistency and becomes a torrent
In black space I mean: I could have a coffee right now
and die moderately.
Fernando Vargas Valencia (Colombia, 1984)
.
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
.
.
You know by heart
that anguish is a prize.
Too bad that sometimes we get lost
the lottery ticket.
You know that every chair promises absences,
that no absence promises chairs.
And you rage like the city is to blame.
As if the chairs and absences were to blame.
As if you were to blame.
You know, and not from memory,
more for stubbornness,
for wanting to be an invented animal,
that pain becomes destiny
when you want to make the sky
a break up.
Edel Morales (Cuba, 1961)
.
.
STREET G. 1982
.
One night we were splitting almonds on G.
It was after 12 and you and that skirt with white flowers
they seemed like eternity.
I stopped for a moment to contemplate the light
and the passage of cars through Havana in 1982.
Everything was so simple.
The old blessed sea in front of the statue of Calixto García.
Your face advancing in the semiclarity of the pines.
The stroke with which my hand searched the red intimacy of the almond.
Everything was so simple
like the life of the water that slips through the fingers.
No one was to come.
We weren't expecting anyone.
I stopped for a moment to contemplate the light
and the passage of cars through Havana in 1982.
You and that skirt with white flowers
they seemed like eternity.
Cinzia Marulli (Italy, 1965)
.
REGARDS
Do you remember mom
coffee at four in the morning
when the darkness still penetrated
in the bones?
Some rags on top
the old black coat and shawl
around the head
and then dad and you
down the street of the triton walking
in silence, side by side
lower your head and sleep in your eyes
the usual office
the same things to clean
with your knees on the polished floorboards
and holy hands in the toilets
I, on the other hand, still at home
with the books on my knees
and then to school to destroy the dirty rags of misery.
Salvatore Ritrovato (Italy, 1967)
YES
September 11 came five years later.
Sitting in an armchair, in front of the television.
Sitting listening to the words
of the last witnesses who have returned
to look for the angel who has saved them.
Sitting alone, waiting. No evidence.
Today it seems that there are no planes falling on the houses.
The maid looks dumbfounded at the two returning towers
five years later to shine in the picture
and they fall again, it's not a mistake
I explain, it is not an American movie,
it has not happened today. I did not know anything.
The afternoon, the day that the world had changed
I collapse on the couch out of breath.
Late perhaps, but I only understood
five years later.
It was a tremendous western question
the hardest day for everyone:
convince yourself that something would change
later. Being afraid of him, for example,
to the world, every day.
And tell it on television.
Believe in capillary controls,
in peace, in the waiting rooms.
In a hidden and distant god.
Wait for the din.
One month after that September 11
I said yes.
Get married in February. An ideal month,
cold and short. Would pass
unnoticed in Venice without carnival.
Yes. Have a welcoming family.
Children, mortgage, single account.
Life insurance. A slight
rush every morning, hoarse voice.
And then the sermons of the pedagogues
and from pediatricians, the prescription from dentists.
And one day I'll have a lighter urn.
Now it's easy to end up in ash and rubble.
I tremble at the thought of going down stairs
and stairs before I dissolve that day
like that September 11
at work or on vacation.
Staying in the crack of a building
of glass and papier-mâché that crumbles,
burned, pulverized.
Like an air gap, hungry rust.
In front of a tiny city.
looking for another higher wall
protected, and spurs, and flies
Where planes can't fall
Should not. But it is not easy.
Gabriela Cantú Westendarp (Mexico, 1972)
.
.
As if I don't speak enough during the day they say
that I talk while I sleep, and I think they tell the truth.
Last night my own voice woke me up as if it were that of
someone else. It seems that some of my nightly phrases
have to do with dates and names, but sometimes
I also curse, that is, I say high-sounding words, words
that said in broad daylight and in full consciousness
they would worry. They claim that only 5% of adults suffer from
of somniloquia - scientific word that refers to speaking
while sleeping. They also ensure that in those recitations
real and fantastic elements are mixed. It is true that I suffer
certain sleep disorders and that sometimes I wish I could sleep
three or four days in a row without any interruption; and although I am
certain that this is far from happening I do not lose hope.
Gabriel Chávez Casazola (Bolivia, 1972)
.
.
NIGHT FLIGHT / POETIC ART 1
That light that goes out
it is not an empire
not a firefly.
Antoine knew it, he knew it flying over Patagonia.
That light that goes out is a house that stops making its gesture
to the rest of the world,
a mansion
—A humble mansion if anything fits: all the houses of man
they are a mansion, all the mansions of man a cabin—
a mansion, said Antoine, that closes on his love. Or about his boredom.
A flickering light to which
-Cold to heat-
some peasants gathered
they hold on
castaways balancing a match
before the immensity
from a desert island.
.
Raúl Hernández (Chile, 1980)
.
DRIZZLE
There is a shadow chased away by the dogs.
There are fish dying in the deserted basket.
And nothing suggests that this morning
the faces of the sidewalks will continue to be illuminated.
You exist like leafless fog of public squares
you warm the air with your hidden transit.
From the windows of the schools
they see you appear like the stranger who interrupts the class
between a student and thought
between the clear word and destiny
through the layer of torpor and desire.
There is a shadow chased away by the dogs
nothing simplifies the eyes of the drizzle
and without looking back
the walker wanders swearing illusion.
A limited meaning of winter
from a corner of the road.
Carolina Dávila (Colombia, 1982)
.
.
NO OTHER WATERS PENETRATE WITH THE RAIN
.
I would love that woman who wanders
through a desert of frozen nights
while rumors of some port reach him
but they don't break their silence
nor do they soften the grooves
that the pain traced on his face
I would love her because she does not bend
because other waters do not penetrate with the rain
because his body opens there
where spring is not enough
.
Angela Suarez T. (Colombia, 1982)
.
.
BEDROOMS
.
I list wrappers
of clandestine sweets.
I order superfluous papers,
picturesque.
Conspiracy
against the fractal collection of your silences,
Against your strange fear of knotting yourself
Against your little abstract window
and unfinished.
István Turczi (Hungary, 1957)
.
.
SIX VERSE POEM ON HISTORY
.
(Hatsoros will see történelemről)
Christs, kings, ideologues
and tyrants transfigured in other battles,
like corroded plastic jars
they fly together towards the Great Exit,
until eternal peace comes,
even worse than any war.
Balázs F. Attlila (Romania, 1954)
.
BIRTH OF CASANOVA
.
.
"Handsome boy" observed the midwives, placing the baby on his mother's chest as he struggled to free his throat from the pain of the universe.
So he continued after a short sleep when, drawn from the red marble sink, he was vigorously deposited in the dressing room. And much later, after passing into the arms of his father.
"My son" - lifted him up in the air; then, not calming down, he handed him over to an attractive aunt. What a miracle: the little boy stopped crying in the woman's soft arms.
"Look at this!" his father muttered under the mustache, uncorking and pouring the champagne. "For young Casanova!"
The newborn did not seem to share the family joy. The party held in his honor took place without his participation
On the way to church, before putting his son in the arms of his godparents, old Casanova prayed to God. He asked that his son be filled with all the repressed dreams and desires that he could not achieve: to love women with the courage, determination and opportunity that he had never had.
And the Lord, who was in a good mood, heard her prayer. The adolescent Casanova stroked shy but provocative girls without limitation; From his hiding place, he saw his parents make love, bathe his aunt and his cousins together. He trained his cock so that it was almost always proudly straight. She quickly learned the secrets of the bed from her maid, who knew all the resources. Then they came, one after another: the governess, the butcher's widows and the coachman, the housekeeper's daughter, the grocer's granddaughter, and after them hundreds and hundreds more.
He fornicated until the end of his days, enjoying the arms and breasts of beautiful girls and women, just as his father had invoked.
But when his child was born, Casanova asked God to bless him with a boring marriage and a mediocre life.
And the good Lord heeded her request.
Adnan Al-Sayegh (Iraq, 1955)
.
.
POEMS OF THE RAIN
.
* *
.
Oh! Rain…
stay in the streets rebelling
like cats and children
stay in the crystals shining
gliding like the goats of light
and do not enter the coats of the rich
nor in the stores
fearing to contaminate your white hands
with the money.
* *
Oh rain!
Oh! The letters that go from the sky to the fields
show me how the flower of the poem opens
of the speech stones.
* *
When the rain dies
the fields will fire their coffin
just the tiny cactus
will laugh in the deserts
disappointed in the weeping of the trees.
Translated by:
Muhisin Al - Ramly
Azucena del Rio
Mohammad Hudaib (Palestine, 1965)
.
.
EIGHT FIFTEEN
.
Love for this morning
is finding your shaving brush
next to the machine
and realize for a moment
that you are opening the window all the way.
Love is a battle of sheets
during which you realize for a moment
that you are captivated by a stain
on a woman's hip.
Divine drawing of the flower of fire, it is the stain.
.
Paulo Ferraz (Brazil, 1974)
.
ONLY THE IMPOSSIBLE IS IMPOSSIBLE
Let me read your luck. Barely me
I realized and I already had the hand of
the old woman clinging to mine. Hand
beautiful, old, less gypsy
that begs. fine skin,
but those lines. What me
he said later he was lost
in pollution; my mind
stirred, to save
his palmistry, the garbage can;
later, done the chore,
deciphered: good fortune
of your there are superimposed
a shrill siren sounds
cia, your uniqueness
maybe it's in your destiny
(I think the correct translation
would be: your fatality).
Eat this ream, eat
This ream, this ream feeds
your belly and fill the intestines,
you may be indigestible.
Will be. Then choose how
the letters will come out of your body
written on every page.
Until recently I was mute,
happy and dumb, ignorant and
dumb, why dumb my
way of living in the world?
It would be better to be still
in a corner, be one of those
Carlos Aguasaco (Colombia, 1975)
.
.
NEW YORK
.
.
This world is by definition contempt and arrogance.
Gesture of disgust and the disgust of men shoulder to shoulder
Sitting on the train.
Fixed gaze that crosses over you at the midpoint
And in you it dissipates into a turban-shaped arabesque.
This world is not your world and it is.
The city is there to be taken
The city is there to splurge
To give contempt, to be a reflection of man and man
To remember that always, no matter where you look,
The heat of a lens shelters you with obscene discretion
Of who without looking at you observes you.
It would be necessary to kill John Lenon and face sarcasm
To smile at the camera so that she denounces you
In the headlines for ten continuous years without paying you a penny.
Laugh like crazy and stink of money
Stink like crazy and laugh at money.
New York, it's not me you greet
With your torch lit in the Atlantic.
Najman Darwish (Palestine, 1978)
.
.
JERUSALEM
.
.
If I abandon you around in stone
if I return to you I turn a stone
I call you Medusa
I call you older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
your baptismal font that made Rome burn
The rumor of the murdered his poems in the hills
the rebels censor their chroniclers
meanwhile I leave the sea and come back
I come back to you
through this stream where your despair runs
I listen to the reciters of the Koran the shrouds the corpses
I hear the dust of those who grieve
I'm not thirty yet but you've buried me time and time again
and again because of you
I emerge from the ground
let those who pray for you go to hell
who sell souvenirs of your pain
those who are standing with me in the photographs
I call you Medusa
I call you older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
your baptismal font that still burns
Fakhri Ratrout (Palestine, 1972)
.
THINGS I MISS
.
.
Tonight I miss many things:
That I hold the perfume that I lost
from a woman long ago
May god be my friend
That sadness does not attack me
Let it be me this afternoon
That I never think again that I am the hell of God
with which the disobeyed world punishes
That crazy people fall asleep in their cells inside me
Let no one die at the end of the night
May the mirror show me my false face
That I hear the whistle of a cricket
That my brain is not the dinner of the world
That the world does not undress in front of me
That the moon does not see blood shed at night
That my scared curtains fall asleep
That I do not die this afternoon
Don't let the blue elephant crush me
Let no one ask me:
What is the blue elephant?
Ahmed Al-Shahawi (Egypt, 1960)
.
THIS IS MY TOMB
هكذا قبري
I want to be buried alone.
No one before, no one after me.
That they wrap me in a linen shroud
Like an old egyptian sage
And let my face look up to the sky
I want to take my perfumes with me
And my toothbrush
And the poems that he hadn't recited yet
And the books that I didn't read
So as not to go out naked in the city
Give me papers and pencils
So that the grave does not strangle my dreams
Let two mulberry trees appear over my name
I would like to choose from the book of Allah the azora "Lee"
And the verse: "We have not taught him poetry"
For the two to be witnesses
And let them write my name in Persian calligraphy
And with Arabic characters.
Just as Allah likes to see a poet like me.
There would be no such thing as what prohibits fruits and women
Because paradise may not be under my feet.
Fernando Cazón Vera (Ecuador, 1935)
.
THE OBESE COW
.
The obese cow
does not contemplate the rose
nor cry in the storm.
When the field matures
look at the loneliness of your land
and on the distant moon
believe find the horns
of his archangelic bull.
The obese cow
he has to die one day for us.
.
Sonia Manzano (Ecuador, 1948)
.
THE PROMISE
.
If one day both of my hands are seized,
if they seize the goldfinches from my tongue,
if they raid my garlic garden
the flocks of pecking crows.
If they break the glass in my eyes
to accept the crystal of resignations,
if they tie me to the leg of silence
to scratch my soul:
bound, gagged, stripped of the neck,
with no other option in hope,
it would bruise the anguish,
hit me with the punching wind
until leaving with the most eternal arms
through the open seams of the night.
.
Maritza Cino Alvear (Ecuador, 1957)
.
.
UNFAITHFUL IN THE SHADOW
.
At that time
I got involved with nothing
I put off the words
I divorced my sex.
God was waiting for me
in a place on your skin.
Hidden in his tunic,
with earthly mysticism
I rewrote the gospel.
.
.
Siomara Spain (Ecuador, 1976)
.
.
THE WOMAN WHO LOVED MEN
.
I love men
He said
beings without forgiveness
no tongue or sign
I love the stubbornness of their banal indecencies
his hands that twist sanity
and drag the spoils of their forbidden love into the abyss
those who praise each other in the night of hymen
as they lie in the clutches of doubt
and in the high tangle of desire
erect and violent
they drag their exquisite fury to the den of feasts
while wrapping
how you throw
like braids
his paleolithic fingers
in the waves of the last body
He said
But I love the cleverly androgynous more
I love his slim hands of a writer or artist
unable to wield their own name
because they dream of being called
Paris, Alejandro, Lucifer or Antonio
He said
I also love the straightened voice
that rides the harmony of my name
He said
and I bow a hundred times like an indecipherable fool
before the most sinister of men
that with a reversed and gleaming tongue
take me to the ear
ordinary and wicked
holy stupid things that I believe
