POSTS

Em Roth

Always Yours, Summer 2024 Letters

“of what future are these the wild, early days?” – Kyle Tran Myhre

Dear beloveds:

Today I am listening to the [               ] Police Department scanner while I watch goats nibble on buckthorn out the window. I am cross-stitching and three of the goats are not tethered so I am responsible for them, well, not running away. Like us, however, they are very social creatures and tend to desire company. So, it’s most likely fine.

I’m telling you this because I feel I am split between two worlds. Not merely the rural/urban divide, though that is quite tangible. No, I am listening with one ear to the constructed world of death-making and surveillance while, with another, I am listening to the sound of contented munching, of something real and visceral and of this place I call home for the moment. I am making something with my hands and I am thinking about what seeds are being planted across the road. At the same time, I am fully surrounded by those systems of devastation: I am living in a food apartheid zone, where the nearest place for food is a gas station and the closest market is 25 miles away. The “Big Agriculture” potato farming corporation has planted rows and rows of monocrop as far as the eye can see in some places, and giant, tank-like pesticide sprayers roll down the highway in front of me when I drive. A helicopter passed over us just the other day, dumping something across the fields.
____

I just finished reading the book not a lot of reasons to sing, but enough and I’ve been sitting with that, as well. It’s a book of poetry with a plot: two poets (one human, one robot) are traveling around the moon prison colony, watching the early stages of a revolution and reflecting on the first revolution of their history. In this reading, I wonder, what future are we co-creating? What does it even mean to think about the future, when the present is a devastation?
____

We know there aren’t two worlds. It’s just this one, with its utter grief and its joy. There is the genocidal police state and what we do to stop it. They exist together, for now. So I’ll keep both ears listening, waiting for what I need to hear.

Yours,
E

 

“WATCH OUT BE PREPARED YOU ARE LIVING IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST we are waiting in exile from the future we are here to save each other we are poised on the knife edge of the abyss the dead and all the living walk beside us in an unending search for an elusive horizon…”

Dear beloveds:

I have rewritten and rewritten this letter several times, in a fruitless search for the perfect words—which, of course, do not exist. The body is too material to hold all this grief, words too static to hold this anger. Today I woke up to the death toll in Palestine, by which I mean I had the luxury of waking up. Of this water, this cup in my hands. And I don’t know what else to say, you know? All the words have been spoken, and I am thinking about how we speak with our bodies. How that is the only way, the only way we get out of “exile from the future,” how we honor the past, how we even attempt to grasp at the present. And, of course, you all know this. I am thinking about:

“how to say resistance. how to say what do we owe
and these streets. not ours until—  and the silence. the clockwork
of response. there is no grit but this, under our fingernails. speak
these two hands and our feet on the pavement, at the very least.”

I am thinking about what [            ] said this week: “I am more afraid of their choices than I am of mine.” This stuck in my chest. I am more afraid of their choices than I am of mine. It’s something I think we all carry with us, knowing all of you. It is at the core of why we act, despite the power of our enemies. Despite the fear.

Or, maybe, because of the fear. Because fear is proof that we love something, someone, with every fiber of our beings. That we love hard, and love deep.

I have been sitting with this poem posted on Twitter (fuck you Musk, I’m not calling it X), that I quoted at the top of this letter. The author goes on to say, “what are we waiting for the kingdom of the dead breathes down our throats” and god, I cried. We are living in the belly of the beast, in the heart of death-making, and I am quite literally in the “heart” of it right now. The rural Midwest carries so much beauty and depth, and also scares the shit out of me.

On one hand, I am surrounded by kindness in a way that I don’t experience in general in [          ]. There is a group of elders here who meet once a week. They share a potluck feast and talk about their experience of their mothers, their hip surgeries. One coaches a robotics team; another is planning to teach [        ] how to knit. They barely knew my name before they were offering me food and a place to sit, to hear their stories. They asked if I would be okay in the rain later that day and how the goats were doing.

On the other hand, I went to a rodeo (a sentence I never thought I would say) and I am ashamed to say that I stood during the national anthem because [        ] reminded me that we would be physically endangering the interns if I didn’t. I felt disgusted as they paraded a Big Agriculture flag around on horseback during the advertisement section (because, yes, at a rodeo they advertise to you on horseback). And, the owners of the rodeo arena gave their land for free to the water protectors in 2021. They offered space to camp and still hold events where they cheer “water is life” and “love water not oil.” They host potentially The Most American thing besides bombings and coups, and yet they also supposedly support LandBack.

Days later, I sit with [            ]’s grandchildren on a hot afternoon and play pretend. We dream up stories about princesses and evil witches, where the princesses save their people but the witches steal their land — but the princess promises to get it back someday. This does not feel like pretend anymore. I pitch my voice and I think of the teachers in Palestine, doing the voices and refusing the shaking of the ground. I think about the promise of liberation and I want it to be real for them, for these girls, for all of us.

Last week, hope felt tangible. This week it is a discipline. This week it is a practice. And this letter hasn’t done a perfect job of that practice, has it? I guess it’s more real this way. But I’ll leave you with one thing that my heart has held lightly.

I am staring at a pile of pure orange kittens, birthed by a cat whose name we do not know. They are small and fragile and squirming with a slight dusting of fur. They stick close to each other, and have been carried by their mother into the floor level cabinet of the cabin where I’m staying. We put a blanket in there, to protect them from the splinters and the styrofoam cups that make up their current interior design. I am staring at this pile of kittens, two weeks or so old now, and they are valiantly trying to move towards the cupboard door, sticking one paw on the ground whenever I open it. They quickly retract the paw upon meeting the cold floor, and squirm back to their pile. Their eyes are just barely open and I can hold each one in the palm of my hand, but they quickly become a little ball of mewling when I try. I have seen them take their first steps and know that, soon, they will be underfoot.

I am scared for them but, again, fear is proof we love something, right? I’m scared for you all, as I know you keep fighting in what ways you can. But that’s proof of something, I know.

Yours,
E

 

Dear beloveds:

I have been opening this document to write to you for weeks now, always stumbling over the words. To be blunt: I’ve got to get over myself. Because of that, some of this will be fragmented, snippets from weeks past that still speak to me in some way. So it goes, I suppose.

Two weeks ago, I wrote: I have stayed on this farm longer than I intended and will be returning to [         ] sooner than I intended. The longer I am here, the more I think of you. The longer I am away, the more I wish to take up what I have learned and bring it to you with open hands. Besides, I am afraid my car may break down if I were to continue to journey north. Such is the way of inheriting a car. Such is the way of remembering there is always work where you are.

(Well, dear readers, guess what? My car did break down! But I’m safe, I promise, after a good cry on the side of the road. And a call to my mother.)

“History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the [ ] are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?” – Solmaz Sharif

The third week of July, I wrote: I am angry and out of graceful words. Too many people are thanking their executioners on Twitter. Or, put another way, so much has happened since last I wrote; so much stays exactly the same. I find myself opening the app and watching the world through the mediation of likes and reposts, watching the meme-ification of genocidaires and the callous re-sharing of murder videos. The empire continues its machinations and I open another app. I open another app and, my god, how empty it feels to be connected only through a screen. How empty it is to be full of rage.

I wanted this letter to be something beautiful. I wanted to give you something of myself and the woods here, something of the goats and their absurd joy. As if words were something I could hold in my hands and offer to you in place of my absence. But this week I am angry and those words feel just out of my grasp. I figured it’s better to be honest, anyways.

Last week, a child ran away again. Her story is not for me to tell but I will tell you mine. The week before, the cops came to our door and asked for her by name. I found her, half an hour later, in [            ]’s home. I sat with her for hours; I made her a sandwich and she was too hungry for it. Eventually, she asked me to take her back. We can only communicate via Instagram and this week, I hope for a new post. This week, I sit on the dock and wish she could be here. I check my phone, I check my phone, I check my phone and—

I work on social media for [            ] and I worry for her, even as I am angry with her for ignoring and somehow simultaneously overworking the interns. I explain the non-profit industrial complex to one [         ] and she looks even sadder. I take her for coffee and she cries. I cry with her, angry at the way we are imperfect in enacting our beliefs and how we hurt each other. Angry at… well, again, how empty it feels to be so full of rage.

So, I hold her hand. We sit in a coffee shop, and I think about Franny Choi’s words:

In lieu of proximity to firefighters; in lieu of the ability to speak the airlesss language of ghosts; or to reverse the logic of molecules; or to force Exxon to call the hurricane by its rightful name; or to convince my friends not to launch themselves from the rooftops of every false promise made by every rotten idol; in lieu of all I can’t do or undo; I hold.

I sit in that coffee shop, on that dock, next to the goats while I feed them grain for the last time, in the car by myself, in each meeting with so many of you, in every moment of grief, I hold. Or, I try, at least. Whatever it may mean, in those times. However metaphorical. However tangible. In trying, I am reminded, over and over again, that I need to stop orienting towards our executioners. Not merely in the explicit, the external, but in every facet of my being. To kill the cop in my head means to stop letting my anger overtake my capacity to function. I said that I was out of graceful words, and that still feels true, but I want to practice life in the midst of so much death-making, as people resisting all over the world teach us. So I will reach for those words, with whatever imperfection comes. And I know I’m not alone.

My final day there, three of us went onto the lake. We paddled and rowed and I tipped the kayak over, trying to go swimming. I kept working to get the water out, flipping it this way and that, jumping into it and hitting my knees against the hard plastic. They, laughing, reminded me that the dock was right there, I just had to wade through the algae. At the risk of using an overdone metaphor, I think I’m finally understanding that the dock is there, with all of you.

I am now en route to [        ] and I’ve seen four (4!) rainbows on the road. I made the obligatory “I love being queer” joke to myself but I’m also trying to hold onto what is beautiful. What is life-giving, at this moment. What I mean to say is, how grateful I am to be alive at the same time as you. How grateful I am to remember that I just have to reach out. That we hold each other.

Always yours,
E

 

Em Roth (they) is an educator and organizer in Boston. They believe in the promise of liberation and are enamored with the way that goats look in the sunset. If you are moved in any way by their work, they encourage you to donate to https://gazafunds.com/. Their poetry has been previously published by beestung, BRAWL Lit, and the B’K.

 

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Jane Shi

Shattered Pixels, Shared Oxygen

Dear stranger. Ancestor I never knew. Friend I never had. A kinship of only coincidence.

I build with you this altar of sentences.

What do I get to want for you but all the beautiful things. All the spectacular lived-in geometries.

For you to argue with me, fight with me. Whether it is voyeuristic to grieve you in public, a form of theft. Whether it is a duty of the mad. Duty of the alive.

For you to witness this burning hand holding your loved ones in your incense absence. Everything on fire. Everything so ready and close.

Today I will not bury my wide, wide desire inside a Sun Fresh bun, steamy and chubby like we once were. My desire for a chance (there is always a fraction of a decibel of a chance) you might hold that desire with me.

thank you for loving me thank you for loving me thank you for loving me

No, no, nothing serious like a zhongzi. That’s too much work to unravel, too many sticky fingers, I don’t want you to fuss like that. No fancy outfits.

Dear ancestor. Older sister from another set of parents. From the same set of feelings. Yuenfen without yuenfen. The ordinariness of kin.

What do I get to offer you but an epistolary from the cleaves and orange peels of disappointment. I did not meet you through an impulsive page of a diary stitched together per second with a thin green string. I met you because I saw you through the silky eye of the needle and stained my fingers with thread.

I build with you a space to rage with the rest of us, and at your bidding. Older sister, dearer.

I want to tell you about what’s happened. Neither you nor I led each other anywhere. We both knew where we were going. Here in this away it was me and then ah-yi spinning each other via torque across the aisles. We were in front of the checkout stand, the place to buy lotto—to return used tissue paper, to look indifferent, both sputtering switches of backward merry-go-rounds, halting convenience stores. Dear language. Dear stanza we can’t return to.

A howling wrench of watching us

/ dear guma / dear yieyie / dear yingying / dear ah-yi / dear jiujiu / dear poh-poh / dear queer / dear autistic / dear crazy / dear suicidal / dear psychotic / dear bipolar / dear friend /

be too afraid to leave our homes. And then when we speak, they want us to be nanoseconds, to be pencils. Ah-yi sings pink strings in the air, clouds that made them recoil. Echolalia of survival and ritual. I yell at the worker who yelled at ah-yi and dip into the ground. 

dear sister / dear / dis / dear / re / dear / orientation

What do I have but this witness,

Then my voice was a sudden visor, shielding her from the bright light. Then I had this voice: sharp, electricity, cyclone. These moments—we barely acknowledge each other / we don’t acknowledge each other—are all we have.

to get her, to not get her.

But they can be enough. They would have to be for now.

An inhale of transient connections, November, cool air, 25% of the way through—I wonder what toothpicks, what knives, what keys, what medicines there are to offer one another. This dangerous makeshift bathroom of dreaming what you couldn’t have. Dear friend among friends.

I don’t want you to be alone. I become only five when I say this, hands barely holding chopstick, wanting pebbles, wanting the plastic peach, drawing a picture of you. Crayon. Wallpaper. Messy. Dear playmate. don’t want       to be alone  

I know, deep down, there is an accounting to be done. There are eyes I cannot look at. And yet I choose yours. Dear fellow procrastinator, how have you been? 

***

Solidarity between the living and dead does not emerge fully sprung from the world’s perception of shared experiences and affiliations. Such solidarity must instead be an intentional conversation rooted in respect. Grief is rooted in respect, or it is not grief. Grief cannot be taken, possessed, whitewashed, or cleaned of the gnarly unfiltered mildew television dust between skin and walls. This eulogy will always be problematic, unspeakable in its tenuous, strained connection, never attached to a name.

You might otherwise say:

Yes,
diaspora                                   
gender
madness
sensation
shared cultural roots,

maybe. But

no. No time.                           

Spines of textbooks make some deaths sensation and others static. In writing you, I grab hold of the railings of in-between, the soft arm of unknowing. You can ask me to leave. To leave you alone, to undisturb you. And I will heed. I will pry myself way.

What would it mean for the living to atone for our callousness, our greed? To offer something as remedy for the way our noses grazed your throat, tricked you so you can no longer speak. We can only ask, again and again, if we have permission to listen to you now. I can only ask you, without hunger, without whim, again and again.  

…I know, it wasn’t really my responsibility. But I still wish I could have known how. I wish I could have had what it takes. I wish, y’know? You don’t have to forgive or shun me. That’s too much to ask of a stranger. I am sitting here quietly on the grass, in the rain, hearing the clouds pass and crow chatter. The sky facing us is rainstorm that looks back on the summers of fires. Burnt palm of god. The other side is refraction, a partition, a way to fold all that we have forgotten, away. A way.  

Maybe all we can really do is just hang out and sit. Here, want to see what I got you? It’s still hot.

To communion with those no longer here and to ask them to rage, grieve, witness, and heal with us means that we can never forget their presence in the room. It means asking the room to grow to hold them with us. Accommodating the dead is disability justice, too. It means asking us why we built a room that only gets smaller and smaller. It means a poetics of altars: an altering of clause and unweathering of causation so that someone else might sit comfortably. It means a sense of humility toward these lapses in time. What would it mean for us to listen to these other audiences, these other speakers, to trace our fingers across the ridges of silence? What do we ask of absence when we breathe beside her our elemental rage, joy, and sadness?

To extend our hand—subject to the air, our ill health, the way veins trap toxins and breadcrumbs—to those who did not see the world change the way we have feels almost heartlessly cruel. I might forget. I might doubt. Are you really with us? Do you want to be? Oh, how everything has become worse, especially, dear friend, without you. Oh, the books you could have read. Oh, how desperate this voice is, how dusty.

But maybe it is crueler to pretend that you are really gone, to pretend that we are no longer accountable to you in your absence. To pretend you are not in the same room when I hold my own hand. I accept whatever answers you have for me. Even if, in this speaking, wailing, unknotting, you reject me. Call out my hypocrisy. Laugh at the way I burrow my head into my chest.

I won’t be deferential. You have been here in the room, eavesdropping. I adore this cheekiness; I want to laugh with you. Through death and the violence of perception you met me and are meeting me. We are having this conversation, finally, and I am grateful. Large hard jewel between the palm of lifelines and love-lines. You respond.

Language cannot intercept or surveil this text message. Letters refuse to corrode the madness of grief. The connection sputters. You receive it. I flip the coin and ask if you have eaten. I sip on this cup of water. Dearest dreamer.

***

I build with you this balm, all the way down, up, sideways, everywhere, gone.

 

Jane Shi is a poet, writer, and organizer living on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her debut poetry collection is echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. Photo by Joy Gyamfi.

 

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mónica teresa ortiz

Technophile

“And the joy and the pain//And they call the thing rodeo” – Garth Brooks
for Lexi

1. There’s a rodeo in Kentucky on the television. 
2. What does that mean? 
3. I am thinking of you on the lunar new year.
4. Rodeo started as a procedure to gather cattle around 1551. 
5. The US empire is only 249 years old. 
6. Rodeo is older than the US empire.
7. Rodeo is not older than imperialism. 
8. Time for the clown to dash out. 
9. The rider might be in trouble.
10. Clowns are people with face paint and loose clothing. Their only job is to distract the bulls while the rider escapes.
11. A bull charged me once. I was probably 12 years old and it was probably my fault. I should have stayed in the truck while my grandfather checked the irrigation lines. But I wanted to know how soil turned in my small hands. The dirt was red clay and left a film on my palms.
12. We call them barrelmen now. Their job is to entertain. Sometimes they hop in and out of barrels. Sometimes they hide behind those wooden crates, trying to avoid the bull.
13. I am not entertained.
14. Distraction is a dangerous occupation. There is always a possibility that the clown can get hurt.
15. Could a cyborg replace the rodeo clown? Arena lights might reflect too harshly off metal or plastic, depending on which material is used. They might move too slow. They might not be funny. 
16. Is empire a rodeo? If so, who are the clowns?
17. I am no technophile but can cyborgs really “dream of Eden” or are they the chimeras of empire?
18. Who would you fall in love with? The clown or a chimera?
19. Empire cannot augment our ability to love.
20. You said you are trying to be more kind to machines – that it’s nice to care for things.

 

Unruly Lovers

June Jordan said I commit to friction, while many will not comment on Palestine. What is the purpose of poetry then? I listen to you praise poems about ______, not a single word on occupation or the abduction of Mahmoud Khahlil! 

Louisiana is a landscape far from New York. The swamps of the Gulf Coast are for ancestors, not for prisons. Just ask those in Angola. There is nothing lyrical about incarceration.

This letter aligns with antipoets, whoever you are, longing for lean lines that aren’t a brief history of space or the summer you visited Vermont. We yearn to disrupt, to intervene, to interrupt. I told you I stopped voting years ago, and you wish for me to pretend this land is not occupied. Walter Rodney said that “the ultimate task of the guerilla intellectual is to actively wage a struggle for the terrain of academia, of knowledge production, of knowledge distribution.” 

Miguel James carefully wrote a guideline on being against the police. Let us make that our oeuvre. 
If you want to be my friend I will decline politely. We need to be comrades. We might need to be family. We do not have to be lovers. I do not have to love you to believe in your freedom. There are no metaphors in this poem. Our relationship will not be transactional. I became a poet because George Bush stole an election and manufactured an invasion.

So… I commit to friction. There might be aching. There might be burning. Are you listening to what I am saying? Turn around and see me, devoured.

 

mónica teresa ortiz is a poet, critic, and memory worker born, raised, and based in Texas. They are the author of Book of Provocations (Host Publications, 2024) and invite you to commit to the liberation of Palestine. Photo by Itzel Alejandra.

 

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Ren Koppel Torres

ode to los pachucos

in response to Octavio Paz

my wallet chain
jangles as I sway,
              more than a silver
              accent or a link to
my keys—I am
tethered to a
              collective history
              of exquisite defiance.
qué pachucho: to
be caught up in the
              pendulum of
              assimilation, born
in the hyphen
of one nation 
              sewn to another,
              stitches frayed and
unsteady unlike
the expert craft
              imbued in the
              loud, draping
folds of the zoot
suit. an elegant
              silhouette—
              punctuated
by slender belt,
topped off with
              dancing feather—
              bows to jazz
beats and no
other effigy

 

Ren Koppel Torres is a Jewish Chicano poet and artist based in San Anto. He is the editor-in-chief of Alebrijes Review, a literary magazine by and for Latin@s. His words appear in Diode, Apogee Journal, La Raíz Magazine, and elsewhere. His favorite soup is pozole rojo. Find him online at KoppelTorres.carrd.co. Photo by Ian Clennan.

 

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Erin Vachon

To R., Because Deadnames Make Old Friends Hard to Find & I Miss You.

Yeah, the elderly women from the dried flower department reigned / over us, but our red aprons hid stacks of half-off coupons behind our craft / store IDs, clipped tight. We gossiped over snuck glimpses in the parking / lot: the head manager feeling up that employee. She was sweet. He tended to grandstand. / Refused to use your real name, dead set. His face: a rock / garden, no peace. We rolled our eyes whenever he dropped / your employee ID back in your hand to deadname you. Sympathy forgetfulness, I thought, dropping / my own license on the floor over and over, scolded by the elderly florist with x-ray / vision, who returned it. I fled my own pocket, before I knew who I was. I thought if someone stole my ID, they must be at rock / bottom.  I was a student scraping by on a slim budget, crafting / a self out of used books while you and I laid on a bare mattress in your grandmother’s / apartment. We drank until we stumbled downstairs on a parkour / trek up the street, our stomachs craving salty solids, amusement park / gastric turns on the walk to the Cumberland Farms, sloshed off our asses. Before dropping / off for the night, you described anal with your boy to me, as open as the Grand / Canyon. No bottom between us, or both of us actually. Your boyfriend claimed to be straight, like mine: arrangements / that make me laugh now that I’m older. Gender was our real craft / project. Costumes, our art supplies. We all wore them. That guy plunking rock- / a-billy in your living room, his amps fighting horror flicks playing on video. Punk rock / kissed Rocky Horror. We did what we wanted. Anarchy by faux album release. Parking / our asses on your broken sofa, jumping up and down with Jack and Colas. Crafty / theme parties to loosen anxiety. Nowadays, I suck on sour drops / to stop flashbacks, heart firing as fast as that boy’s drum kit and his long-gone reign / of percussion. Young, we shapeshifted. We made our bodies. Corporate grandiosity / couldn’t claim us. Our manager was one rabid man afraid of wet places, trained to gain from every grand / opening, shocked at our self-possession. He fixed on you being fixed. So we rocked / our heads side to side at hard bigotry, then first-shift, we softened, again and again, and fluffed the felt pom-poms, stacked the crayon / boxes, and tidied the glitter packets. We watched his wife drop off lunch, us lounging loose, parked / in the break room while you absorbed his shots. I had no word for fluidity yet. I was a teardrop. / My flood came later. I was a display of shorn hair, chest flattened by sports bra and unisex craft / t-shirts, no puffy paint or patches. You were so much like your grandmother, so generous. The craft / store hid me among the racks of decals. I should have picked a name there: scrapbook aisle a grand / tour of trans nomenclature, fussy stickers of birds, birthday months, flowers. If I dropped / this name then, who would I be now? A revolutionary November pelting rock / through window in protest, a Crow cawing back at the dark, and every flower in the park, / not just one bud, but blooming on and on, moving through transitional stages, like a spray / of Baby’s Breath in all grandeur, out and out? What I mean is, you moved me: you were a Rock / dropped in my lake when I was water waking up to being fluid. Now the local park / in spring gushes out flashes of our retail friendship, all the crafty hell we used to raise.

 

Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus, the Senior Reviews Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Multigenre + Chapbook Editor for Split/Lip Press. They write outside Providence, RI.

 

 

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Olga Zilberbourg translates Olga Bragina

Botanical Garden

at the Botanical garden on Saturday I saw a cute guy and thought I could be walking next to him right now   no of course I couldn’t
because within me is an anti-matter that turns everything inside out
I wouldn’t have known what to talk about            wouldn’t have known what on earth I’m doing in this garden
well it’s so pretty here         the air is fresh           magnolias flowering            I should walk             I should take pictures
I should repeat that we’re alive despite everything and we can love probably
though these are all theories         this matter has no anti—
well I’m already used to riding downtown without hearing the air raid sirens
I’m used to hearing the stories Kherson refugees tell at the bus stop
I’m used to thinking this is my city             could this be my city            it’s real
it’s not a set constructed for the sake of war

в субботу увидела в Ботаническом красивого мальчика подумала что могла бы идти сейчас рядом с ним нет конечно же не могла бы
потому что внутри меня антиматерия всё выворачивающая наизнанку
я не знала бы о чем говорить не знала бы что я вообще делаю в этом Ботаническом
нет здесь просто красиво конечно и свежий воздух магнолии цветут нужно гулять нужно делать фото
нужно говорить что мы живы несмотря ни на что и можем любить наверно
только это теория всё нет у этой ткани изнанки
нет я уже привыкла ездить в центр не слыша сирены
привыкла слушать рассказы беженцев из Херсона на остановке
привыкла думать это мой город неужели это мой город он настоящий
не декорации построенные ради войны

*

in 2010 we walked about the Voloshin house museum in Koktebel,
thinking, how kind of him to pray for the sake of this side and of that side
well no we didn’t know whether we were this side or that side            in one hundred years people intermingled
gendarmes     factory workers        Russians       Ukrainians     Poles
things got so mixed up that I didn’t know whom I’d pray for if I had to choose one of the sides
yes in 2010 Crimea was ours but we didn’t think about whose Crimea was             moreover Koktebel
I cared more about my poems not getting praised
nobody was ever going to praise them at any workshop
then I cared about my poems not getting praised at a workshop
and now I care that a missile might land on our building
will I be able to ride to my destination or will everyone have to disembark and proceed to a bomb shelter
now having a special feature means having a bomb shelter and a generator
I want to take a tour of the Tereshchenko mansion      today it’s a medical library where my grandmother used to work
once upon a time she took me there        now I remember
there was no occasion        I guess just to show me off to her colleagues after she’d retired
now I want to take the tour             reviews say they have a bomb shelter

в 2010-м мы ходили по дому-музею Волошина,
и думали как хорошо он молился за тех и за этих
нет мы не знали те мы или эти за сто лет так всё перемешалось
жандармы рабочие завода русские украинцы поляки
так всё перемешалось что было бы непонятно за кого здесь молиться если выбирать одну из сторон
да в 2010-м Крым был наш но мы не думали чей там Крым тем более – Коктебель
меня больше волновало что мои стихи никогда не похвалят
ни на одном семинаре их не похвалят
тогда меня волновало что стихи не похвалят на семинаре
а сейчас волнует не попадет ли в наш дом ракета
смогу ли я доехать куда мне нужно или всех отправят в бомбоуежище
сейчас в виде бонуса бомбоубежище и генератор
я хочу пойти на экскурсию в особняк Терещенко где сейчас Медицинская библиотека в которой работала моя бабушка
когда-то один раз она привела меня туда я теперь помню
что и повода не было наверное просто показать бывшим сотрудникам после выхода на пенсию
теперь я хочу пойти туда на экскурсию пишут что бомбоубежище есть

*

suddenly I understand what Kundera’s expression “Life Is Elsewhere” means
yes you move from a wonderful city to a wonderful city but you think that if I die here I will never go home
you visit the world’s top museums you could never have hoped to set foot in          but life isn’t here life is where the war and horror are
life is where your soul has already died
well it was silly of me to quote from bushido that a samurai lives as though he were already dead
these had been only words            none of us knew what this actually meant
none of us knew what it means to visit Europe’s best museums
and not feel anything but death     probably
nothing else remains inside these museums
nothing remains inside these museums but the sense of death
as though you’re considering:       here’s an epitaph     there’s an angel
but nothing will remain except despair

я вдруг поняла что такое “жизнь не здесь” о которой писал Кундера
да ты живешь в разных прекрасных городах но думаешь что если я тут умру больше не попаду домой
смотришь самые лучшие музейные коллекции мира увидеть которые вживую нельзя было мечтать но жизнь не здесь жизнь там где война и ужас
жизнь там где твоя душа уже умерла
нет смешно было цитировать бусидо про то что самурай живет так словно уже умер
но это были слова никто из нас не знал что это на самом деле
никто из нас не знал что значит смотреть на лучшие музеи Европы
и ничего кроме смерти не чувствовать может быть
в этих музеях и нет ничего иного
в этих музеях и не осталось ничего кроме чувства смерти
словно думаешь вот эпитафия вот ангел
а кроме отчаянья не останется ничего

*

here the siren goes off first with the awful wailing then a male voice says “attention, dear citizens, the air raid siren has been turned on” and that all must proceed to a shelter
then again the awful wailing          what charming Friday vibes
well of course people don’t proceed to a shelter every time they hear this
who would bother going to a shelter three times a day and wait there for the all clear
people go on living their usual lives          this wailing becomes background
we’d read in a textbook “people can get used to anything”,
we didn’t know then what “anything” was            we didn’t know enough       didn’t have enough experience
so people got used to sugar being dispensed by vouchers
then they bought the Dendy video console and began shooting ducks and equate themselves with Mario        found happiness for a few years
people get used to the state of anxiety    some people got used to the stockpiled dead bodies at the theater
because if your psyche doesn’t accept the new normal you have to go and kill yourself
the wailing of the alarm has stopped        I don’t know where the heck the missiles are heading
everyone is actually convinced that the missiles are not heading for them

здесь так включается тревога сначала воет ужасно потом мужской голос говорит “увага, шановні громадяни, оголошена повітряна тривога” и о том, что нужно идти в укрытие
потом снова ужасно воет такой вот пятничный вайб
нет никто конечно не идет в укрытие каждый раз когда это услышит
никто не будет по три раза за день ходить в укрытие и ждать там до отбоя
люди живут своей обычной жизнью этот вой становится фоном
когда мы читали в учебнике “человек ко всему привыкает”,
мы не знали, что такое “всё” нам  не хватало информации и кругозора
ну привыкает к тому что сахар по талонам
потом купил приставку “Денди” начал стрелять уток и отождествлять себя с Марио стал счастлив на пару лет
человек привыкает к тревоге кто-то привык к складу мертвых тел в здании театра
потому что если психика не нормализует это надо пойти и утопиться
вой сирены умолк не знаю куда там летят ракеты
каждый на самом деле уверен что летят не в него

*

we are calling           counting the rings    why is nobody answering
then we hear             I’m at a bus stop it’s noisy here     we exhale      thank god
but while we were listening to the rings   my heart nearly exploded
even though it wasn’t hit by a Kinzhal missile
well     I didn’t go out tonight           I watched a movie and then fell asleep
I dreamed of living in the dorms preparing to defend my thesis
sometimes I woke up and heard the air raid sirens
then I fell back asleep and the dorm’s gatekeeper was asking me who I was
I said don’t you know that I live here
look     this ID proves that I live here
I dug in my purse and couldn’t find it amidst all the paperwork
then my adviser showed up           I said my question will sound silly but isn’t it better to ask than not to ask
how long should my thesis be
he started explaining about the font type and size but the siren went off again

мы звоним считаем гудки почему никто не отвечает
потом слышим я просто на остановке здесь шумно выдыхаем слава богу
но пока идут гудки сердце готово разорваться на части
даже если в него не попал никакой “Кинжал”
нет я не пошла никуда я смотрела в кино а потом уснула
мне снилось что я живу в общежитии собираюсь защищать диссертацию
иногда просыпалась и слышала сирены
потом опять засыпала вахтерша в общежитии спрашивала у меня кто я такая
я говорила ну как это я ведь здесь живу
вот ведь документ о том что я здесь живу
рылась в сумке и никак его найти не могла всё какие-то другие бумаги
потом пришел мой научный руководитель я сказала да мой вопрос прозвучит смешно но лучше ведь спросить чем не спросить
какого объема должна быть моя работа
он начал объяснять про шрифт и кегль но снова сирена

*

a year ago I thought this was the end
I simply said goodbye to my family and went to sleep effortlessly
everything else seemed to be happening to somebody else but it was fascinating
as though I’d remained at that point A     I have turned the page
if I do get crushed by a blown-out building
I hope we won’t ever give up         while we have the strength to live we have to fight
people kept telling me the fable about a frog that fell into a bowl of sour cream      so that’s how I’ve been floundering all my life            perhaps this is dumb
perhaps this is all nonsense          all that sour cream
a year ago I was ready to die and now I want to live but to live without fear
today at the store women were buying vodka juice cigarettes             they will be celebrating
they were buying sliced meats      buying tea     well everyone has PTSD    I can hear the strain in their voices    some are intentionally upbeat       others are about to have a fit         and now outside the air raid siren is wailing
this is how we celebrate international women’s day

год назад я думала что это конец
просто попрощалась с близкими и спокойно легла спать
всё остальное было уже не со мной но было интересно
словно я оставалась в той точке А сейчас перевернула страницу
если меня вдруг все-таки придавит разрушенным домом
я хочу чтобы мы не сдавались никогда пока есть силы жить надо бороться
мне всё говорили про эту лягушку и сметану так вот барахтаюсь всю жизнь может быть это глупо
может быть смысла в этом нет никакого вся эта сметана
год назад я приготовилась умереть а сейчас хочется жить только жить без страха
сегодня в кассе женщины брали водку сок сигареты будут отмечать праздник
брали нарезанную колбасу брали чай нет у всех птрс я слышу по голосу одни нарочито бодрятся другие сейчас сорвутся в истерику а сейчас за окном сирена
вот так отпраздновали день борьбы за наши права

*

many have binged “The Walking Dead” and wondered how they would behave in a post-apocalyptic reality
it’s actually strange that the world is almost the same as it has always been but nobody knows who’s alive    who’s a zombie that will bite you   what form PTSD will take this time           from what direction the next missile will come
yes a year ago people first of all emptied the shelves   in the show they did the same
later the groceries were restocked            but what’s happened to each one of us
we thought once COVID was over we’d finally travel abroad
but when the war started the pandemic wasn’t over yet           in Germany we traveled wearing masks
btw the masks were effective         we didn’t get any respiratory sicknesses
who have we become now             virus    war      before that a few economic crises and revolutions
and even before that           empty shelves at the stores           condensed milk instead of wages             rapidly depreciating vouchers
and I   rushing home to find out what happened in the latest episode of “Santa Barbara”
perhaps the apocalypse was always happening and we were preparing for the “post”
not knowing that we wouldn’t recognize ourselves

многие смотрели сериал “Walking Dead” и представляли как бы действовали в ситуации пост-апоклипсиса
на самом деле странно что мир практически такой как всегда но никто не знает кто жив кто зомби который тебя укусит никто не знает что за птрс сейчас накроет тебя с какой стороны прилетит
да год назад первым делом раскупили в магазинах продукты в сериале делали так же
но продукты потом вернулись а что произошло с каждым из нас
мы думали вирус закончится и мы поедем наконец за границу
а на самом деле война началась вирус даже не закончился в Германии мы ездили в масках
кстати маски оказались эффективны никакими орви не болели
кем мы стали теперь вирус война до того несколько экономических кризисов и революций
а еще раньше пустые полки в магазинах сгущенка вместо зарплаты стремительно обесценивающиеся купоны
и я спешащая домой узнать что там в новой серии “Санта-Барбары”
может быть апокалипсис был всегда а мы готовились к этому “после”
не догадываясь что больше не узнаем себя

 

Translator’s Note:

These poems are a part of a cycle that Bragina wrote in 2023, a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. In February 2022, she lived in Kyiv. After several weeks of intense bombing, she and her parents decided to leave the country. She spent several months as a refugee in Eastern Europe before returning to Kyiv.

Many Ukrainian poets met Russia’s full scale invasion with an outpouring of verse. Many fell silent. As is common practice among Eastern European poets, Bragina published her work on Facebook, continuing the practice of a public, online diary that came into being in the late 1990s, with the advent of the Internet. A translator herself, from English and German, Bragina writes both in Ukrainian and in Russian. Long an admirer of her poetic persona, I was honored when she gave me permission to translate some of her Russian-language work. I’m deeply moved by the erudite yet down-to-earth diction of her poems, by its dark humor, and the way that she intertwines past, present, and future in her lines.

Bragina’s work has been translated to English multiple times, including by Elina Alter, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Mark Wingrave, Stephen Cole, Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Lev Fridman, Philip Nikolayev, and Josephine von Zitzewitz.

 

Olga Bragina is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She was born in Kyiv in 1982 and graduated from the Kyiv National Linguistic University with a degree in translation. She has published five collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and two novels.

 

 

Olga Zilberbourg is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) that includes short and flash fiction. Zilberbourg has published translations of Olga Bragina’s poems in World Literature Today, Cagibi, and Consequence Journal.

 

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Brandon Otto translates Léon-Gontran Damas

I Know Nothing Indeed

I KNOW NOTHING INDEED
nothing more sad
more hateful
more frightful
more tearful in the world
than hearing love
throughout the day
repeated like Low Mass

It happened once
a woman came
a woman came to pass
whose arms were heavy with roses

 

Always You’ll Come

Always you’ll come
as you came
even though
I am
at the other end of the World
always you’ll come
as you came
to chase off the fever
of my burning forehead
with your hands
that flourish with jasmine
but how often clammy
with fright

……………………………………………………

Even though I am at the other end of the World
always you’ll come
across the line

 

There Is No Noon That Stays

THERE IS NO NOON THAT STAYS
and since it’s no longer twenty years old
my heart
nor the hard tooth
of the little old man

no noon that stays
I will open it
no noon that stays
I will open it
no noon that stays
I will open
no noon that stays
I will open the window
no noon that stays
I will open the window to the spring
no noon that stays
I will open the window to the spring that I will eternal
no noon that stays

 

Through the Window Half-Opened

THROUGH THE WINDOW HALF-OPENED
on my disdain for the world
a breeze rose
perfumed by stephanotis
while you drew to YOURSELF
the whole curtain

As
I see you
I will always re-see you
drawing to yourself
the poem’s whole curtain
where
God how beautiful you are
but slow to be nude

 

Hiccup

And although I’ve swallowed seven gulps of water
three to four times every twenty-four hours
my childhood returns to me
in a shuddering hiccup
my instinct
like the fuzz the thug

Disaster
speak to me of disaster
speak to me of it

My mother wanting from a son very good table manners

            Hands on the table
            bread is not cut
            bread is broken
            bread is not wasted
            bread of God
            bread of the sweat of your Father’s brow
            bread of bread

            A bone is eaten with measure and discretion
            a stomach ought to be sociable
            and every sociable stomach
            lets out burps
            a fork is not a tooth-pick
            no blowing your nose
            so it’s known
            so it’s seen by all the world
            and then you have rightly
            a well-raised nose
            don’t wipe off the seat

            And then and then
            and then in the name of the Father
                                    of the Son
                                    of the Holy Spirit
at the end of each meal

            And then and then
            and then disaster
speak to me of disaster
speak to me of it

My mother wanting from a son a reminder

            If you don’t know your history lesson
            you shall not go to Mass
            Sunday
            with your Sunday things

            This child will be the shame of our name
            this child will be our name of God

            Be quiet
            I’ve told you or not that you have to speak French
            the French of France
            the French of French
            the French French

Disaster
speak to me of disaster
speak to me of it

My Mother wanting from a son
son of his mother

            You didn’t greet the neighbor
            already your shoes are filthy
            and so I rebuke you there in the street
            on the grass or the Savannah
            in the shadow of the Monument to the Dead
            while you play
            while you frolic with So-and-so
            with So-and-so who isn’t baptized

Disaster
speak to me of disaster
speak to me of it

My Mother wanting from a son much do
            much re
            much mi
            much fa
            much sol
            much la
            much ti
            much do
            re-mi-fa
            sol-la-ti
                do

It came back to me that you didn’t go yet
to your vi-o-lin lesson
A banjo
you tell me a banjo
how do you say
a banjo
you really say
a banjo
No sir
            you know we don’t allow those in our house
no ban
no jo
no gui
no tar
the mulattos don’t do that
so leave that to the negros

 

Translator’s Note:

Damas was one of the key figures of the négritude (“blackness”) movement, alongside the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) and the Senegalese poet and president Léopold Ségar Senghor (1906-2001).  (The Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937) could be considered one of their forerunners.)  Négritude was a movement by French-speaking African authors to focus on the Black experience.  Sometimes this involved drawing on the cultural heritage of their own countries (as Senghor did, in particular); sometimes it involved delving into the “colonized personality” (in Frantz Fanon’s phrase) of Africans and the African diaspora; sometimes it involved recounting their contemporary experience. 

Though the movement was present in prose, its greatest power was in its poetry.  (Thus Sartre’s essay on the movement was entitled “Black Orpheus.”)  Damas’ poetry was metrically irregular and inspired by jazz, and it made use of everyday language (a contrast to Césaire’s frequent Surrealism).  His first collection, Pigments (1937), was so sharp in its discussion of the black experience that it was banned by France as a “threat to the security of the state.”  The poem “Hiccup” comes from Pigments; the remaining poems translated here come from his later collection Névralgies (Neuralgias) (1966).  Both are published by Présence Africaine, the publishing arm of a journal of the same name, for which Damas served as a contributing editor.

In my translations, I have replicated Damas’ line breaks and his indentation (particularly in “Hiccup”), as well as his practice of sometimes including the title, italicized, as the first line of his poems.  I hope I have captured something of his style, though my aim here has been faithfulness to the words rather than to the rhythm.

 

Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was born in Cayenne, French Guiana.  After initial studies in Martinique, he moved to Paris to study law, where he began to write essays and poems.  During World War II, he served in the French Army and took an active part in the French Resistance.  After the War, he continued his literary and political work, serving as the Guianese delegate to the French National Assembly and as a UNESCO delegate for the Society of African Culture.  He spent his final years teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he died.

 

B.P. Otto is a translator, poet, author, and homemaker; his original poetry has appeared in The Lyric, and his translations of poems by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo appeared in a previous issue of ANMLY.

 

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Valeria Rodrigo translates Esdras Parra

from What the lightning brings

THE PAST HAS LEFT YOU BEHIND, YOU HAVE CONSECRATED YOURSELF
            to that past that fed you up

but you live holstered on the stone, the stone is
your horizon

on top of your shoulders, where the pain abdicates, and the
tears dig their grave,
            on that fragile wood, they overcrowd themselves
the days without time

you look at time running in the distance, towards the void
                        of its useless destruction.

 

EL PASADO TE HA DEJADO ATRÁS, TE HAS CONSAGRADO
            a ese pasado que te colma

pero vives enfundada en la piedra, la piedra es
tu horizonte

sobre tus hombros, donde el dolor abdica, y las
lagrimas cavan su tumba,
            sobre esa madera frágil, se hacinan
los días sin tiempo

miras el tiempo correr a lo lejos, hacia el vacío
                        de su inútil destrucción.

 

THERE, THAT THREAD OF SMOKE TILLING MY EAR
that clamor of my head flanked by the wind
or the life that resists its fatality
in the middle of a pure day
there’s fragile snow and absolute
searching its secret
a past that seems irreparable
a trail that deviates from the corn
where the herb numbs.

now we will not have but deserted sheds
dust settling within the shutters
silent debris over our nape.

 

AY, ESE HILO DE HUMO LABRANDO MI OÍDO
ese clamor de mi cabeza flanqueado por el viento
o la vida que se resiste a la fatalidad
en mitad de un día puro
hay allí nieve frágil y absoluta
buscando su secreto
un pasado que parece irreparable
un sendero que se desvía del maíz

donde la hierba se adormece.
ya no tendremos sino galpones desiertos
polvo aposentado en los postigos escombros silenciosos sobre nuestra nuca.

 

WHERE THE NIGHT RISES TO DELVE INTO THE CLARITY
            there too you lack the shadow

I warm my ear of the wind
            here
            in front of the ash of the stone
I fill my hands with that furious cold
I make its roots darker
           in the dense light

 

DONDE LA NOCHE SE ALZA PARA AHONDAR LA CLARIDAD
            allí también te falta la sombra

me acojo el oído del viento
            aquí
            frente a la ceniza de la piedra
lleno mis manos con ese frío furor
hago más oscuras sus raíces
           en la luz espesa​​

 

I LOOK AT THE HORIZON UNDERNEATH THE RADIANCE OF THE
                        battle
and in my anxiety I wait for the finale
            of the strife.
such is my luck, the one that debates against dilated powers
in the middle of enormous stones without smoke
in the pure abandonment, in the absence of all
humidity, as if I could hear the scream of my bones.

if someone were to ask me how to awaken hope
how to discover the herb without giving a single step back
how to silence so much memory and not redden before the
magnificence of the constellations, I would respond
that we still don’t feel the pain of that lost kingdom.

 

MIRO EL HORIZONTE BAJO EL RESPLANDOR DE LA 
                        batalla
y en mi ansiedad espero el fin
            de la contienda.
esta es mi suerte, la que se debate contra poderes dilatados
en medio de enormes piedras sin humo
en el desamparo puro, en la ausencia de toda
humedad, como si escuchara el grito de mis huesos.

si alguien me pregunta cómo despertar a la esperanza
cómo hallar la hierba sin dar un paso atrás
cómo silenciar tanto recuerdo y no enrojecer ante la
magnificencia de las constelaciones, yo respondería
que aún no sentimos el dolor de ese reino perdido.


 

I ONLY ENCOUNTER IN MY ROUTE THIS ENLARGED AIR.
I walk towards it with the docility of the mast that, by chance, talks to me
of the savage pains returned for the winter
eternal guest of some morning, the alive blood, the stone that falls from heaven.

All the air fades or talks while it walks or sprouts out
of the crust of a tree before it addresses us.

The sun gives us its back, takes care of our richness, it returns us
the metal and the wood to fortify our memory.
We have had dust and ash
some surge, some farewells and the promise of other landscapes
givers of shadow and light from some stone.

 

SÓLO ENCUENTRO EN MI RUTA ESTE AIRE AGRANDADO.
Camino hacia él con la docilidad del mástil que, acaso, me hable
De los dolores salvajes devueltos por el invierno
huésped eterno de alguna mañana, la sangre viva, la piedra que baja del cielo.

Todo el aire se desvanece o habla mientras camina o brota
de la corteza de un árbol antes de abordanos.

El sol nos da la espalda, cuida nuestra riqueza, nos devuelve
el metal y la madera para fortalecer nuestra memoria.
Hemos tenido polvo y ceniza
algún oleaje, algunas despedidas y la promesa de otros paisajes
dadores de sombra y luz desde alguna piedra.

 

NOW I DO NOT HAVE THAT PAIN THE STRENGTH OF THE ABYSS
the pain of the stone that lifts up to your chest
           what I do have is the umbral where the wind nourishes itself 
           with its páramo face
this lament that comes from the center of the earth.

 

YA NO TENGO ESE DOLOR LA FUERZA DEL ABISMO
el dolor de la piedra levantada hasta tu pecho
           tengo sí el umbral donde se nutre el viento
           con su rostro de páramo
este lamento que viene del centro de la tierra.

 

Translator’s Note:

The apparition that is leftover from lightning cradles these poems. A welcoming by chance to a search fueled by obsession, often blissfully painful. The illumination and engulfing nightfall from such a strike, done to or by the one that wields the pen, or both, spreads over a battlefield within the mind. Its origins: a cause and symptom of existence within darkness. Language, which strips noise and creates sound from wind, poses itself above the hardness of the stones, nuzzles itself into the emptiness that it encounters with an echo of persistence. That obsession reins in shadows as part of their arsenal. Esdras Parra always attuned her ear to welcome such a strike, to possibly hear her finale, what would be left afterward, or what was left to get there. Within that illumination, the flash emerges from and into her with a violent raze of her body and senses. Her manuscripts were written in a tight, loose script, almost unintelligible, mimicking her knowledge of her inevitable but intangible goodbye.

Lo que trae el relampago (What the Lightning Brings) is made up of two books that nourish themselves on each other: Cada noche su camino (Each Night its Own Path) and El extremado amor (The Extreme Love). They diffuse as each follows the sensorial progression of the light/shadow of the other. The books have a symbiotic relationship, insisting on their reflection; one represents the finale of a life, and the other the beginning of that echo. These works, written in the final years of her life, reflect deep ontological and existential contemplations, grappling with themes of death, love, and the self​​​​: “Why does the shadow not have as well its own echo”. These hyper-humanistic themes of solitude, existential search, and reflection demand a profound call for meaning within the imagery of a naturally abstract landscape. These poems give us a somber, imaginative third space during her auto-grieving. Through a navigation on this battlefield, the elemental pastoral wields the senses as her weapon. Parra invites us into her somber escape, constructing an introspective utopia to face and claim victory in armor and glory against her existence within transnecropolitics and extending her life into perennial preservation.

Despite Parra’s poems braiding universal themes and an affective state of wonder, she still very much exists and masters her cultural practice. Subjectivities of language and cultural presence are necessary in poetic creations. In THE PAST HAS LEFT YOU BEHIND, YOU HAVE CONSECRATED YOURSELF, Parra utters “a ese pasado que te colma”, using the word “colma” has specific cultural signifiers aside from the direct use of the word’s definition which means “filled up” or “heap”. And while in colloquial use it contains remnants of its formal definition, in slang it is used to describe the inconceivable or unthinkable. The closest translated rendition I believe would be “fed up”. It is a phrase that is used to describe something that is unfair due to how “filled up” you are.

Translating Parra’s poems is an intimate task through her entrapment, through wounds. Like stitches made of grass, she embraces the precarity of life by its teeth. Her landscapes form a whirlpool of time travel, and teleportation for a diaspora, of being a child in the wonders of the Andes mountains. She was born and spent her childhood in Mérida, where the Andes are at their oldest. Though at its lowest height in comparison to the rest of the mountain range, one can hear the calls of such ancient formations in the fog curtain. Being a child on such a mountain you are connected to some of the oldest lands at their last breaths. In this collection, Parra exhumes this relationship in conversation with her body at its last exhalations as a child does to a mountain. In NOW I DO NOT HAVE THAT PAIN THE STRENGTH OF THE ABYSS, she speaks about the “páramo”, which is a variety of alpine tundra ecosystems located in the Andes Mountain Range. The ecologist Zdravko Baruch broadly describes the páramo as “all high, tropical, montane vegetation above the continuous timberline”. Within the mountains, you see rounds of soft peaks and valleys lush in full green. Although one can’t see how high one is, you feel it. The cold is thin due to such heights, soft but enters your ears and whispers in shivers. Páramo can be translated to “moorland”. As a child myself of such lands, I believe it integral to honor the zone not just as a type of land but as one that deserves its own distinct title. This type of Venezuelan ecological subjectivity is instrumental in Parra’s pastoral elements, therefore I decided to keep the sonics of the original word intact.

Parra baptizes us into her hyper-naturalistic landscape and uses elemental and a sensorial arsenal to transverberate her introspective existentialism and the radical negativity that drives the gravitational force for her perennial futurity against her approaching terminality. She is the owner of a singular voice. Parra offers texts that insist on surviving. Plotted along an orbit of transubstantiation and nature, she wields a battlefield along an ontological trip constructed in fragmented, iridescent points and luminescent sharp edges. She utilizes this cyclical conversion through such a transitory stage of the edges of life to drive original questions within Venezuelan poetry.

 

Esdras Parra was a trans poet, writer, essayist, translator, and illustrator born on July 13, 1929 in Santa Cruz de Mora, Mérida, Venezuela, and passed away on November 18, 2004 in Caracas. She studied philosophy in Caracas at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and in Rome. Her professional career included being the literary director of Monte Ávila Editores, coordinating the literary paper of the El Nacional newspaper, and serving as the editor-in-chief of Revista Imagen. Parra’s literary journey began with three notable narrative books: El insurgente (1967), Por el norte el mar de las Antillas (1968), and Juego limpio (1968). However, she eventually focused exclusively on poetry and drawing. Her poetry works include Este suelo secreto (1995), which won the Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas, Antigüedad del frío (2000), and Aún no (2004), which was published shortly before her death. Lastly, these are poems from Parra’s posthumously published collection, Lo que trae el relampago (What The Lightning Brings, 2021), published in Caracas by Fundación La Poeteca in 2021. It gathers the two poetry collections she left unpublished: Cada noche su camino, written between 1996 and 1997, was carefully revised for a definitive final version; and El extremado amor, written between 2002 and 2003, which never had a conclusive draft as she was uprooted by illness and death.

Valeria Rodrigo is a lesbian writer and translator from Valencia, Venezuela. She is featured or forthcoming in Foglifter, Azahares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Columbia Review.

 

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Liana Kapelke-Dale translates Blanca Verela

Midday

for José María Arguedas

Everything is ready for the sacrifice.
The cow moos in the adobe temple.
Harsh red tear,
rubble in flames,
silence and the strong scent of sunflower,
of crowned roosters.

Not one leaf will fall,
only the species falls,
and the fruit falls, poisoned by the air.

There is no center,
all these faces in stone
are horrible flowers,
messy stars, without will.

Not one hour of peace in this immense day.
The light devours its portion so cruelly.

The sea is distant and alone,
the earth, impure and vast.

 

Letter

for N.

Open fruit unspoiled by the air,
undented blade, never blackened,
the blood flows towards you
and returns without danger,
without bridges,
thought rests within you.

Sundial,
noble hue,
the summer of my house,
for your sake the wolf is educated
and the rodent returned to its nest.

Sister,
your white face, closed
with no discernible history,
you, the very one, immobile,
pure ideal.

 

Eve Leaves

animal of salt
if you turn the head
on your body
you will become

            and you will have a name

and the word
slithering
will be your mark

 

Translator’s Note:

In addition to translating Spanish-language poetry, I am a poet myself. Blanca Varela’s poetry is surrealist and lyric rather than narrative, and I think that only a lyric poet could translate her work with any real authenticity. There’s no such thing as a 1:1 translation, but I believe a translation can come close to a kind of equivalency if it maintains this authenticity along with the integrity of the piece. I’ve done my best to do that here, with Varela’s poetry.

I first came across Varela’s work when I was studying at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (La PUCP) in 2011. I purchased her final collection, Concierto animal (Animal Concert), from the university bookstore and was immediately captivated by her stark honesty and her uncanny manner of truth-telling. The stanza that first really got me was from her poem “esta mañana” (“this morning”): “this morning I am other / all night / the wind gave me wings / to fall”.

Over the last 14 years, I’ve acquainted myself with more and more of Varela’s work, and a few years ago I began translating some of her poems, just for my own enjoyment, when I realized that few English translations existed of her work. Varela, who is now well known in Peru and other parts of South America, initially had to be championed by a man: Octavio Paz. The idea of introducing more Latin American women writers to English-speaking audiences galvanized me and my translation work.

Varela’s work is a fascinating challenge for a translator. In many of her poems she uses no punctuation or capital letters, and the syntax can be tricky to unpack; however, I actually find those poems easier to work with. The main reason for this is that it gives me more leeway to play around with line breaks. This may not sound like a big deal but it makes the translating job much freer (if that makes any sense)! The other big challenge is simply that the imagery she uses is so unique, so precise and sharp, that it’s quite the creative process to try to “match” it as well as possible in another language.

If these pieces speak to you, please share them! Varela was a singular writer and deserves much wider acclaim than she currently enjoys.

 

Blanca Varela (1926-2009) was a surrealist poet born in Lima, Peru. With contemporary fellow Peruvian poets, she sparked a national poetry movement known as “la Generación del 50.” Her early work was championed by Octavio Paz, who wrote the introduction to Varela’s first volume of poetry, Ese puerto existe (That Port Exists, 1959). Varela has been honored with myriad awards, including the Octavio Paz Prize for poetry in 2001, the Federico García Lorca City of Granada International Poetry Prize in 2006, and Spain’s Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2007. Despite this acclaim, she has not yet been translated extensively into English.

Liana Kapelke-Dale (she/her) is a queer and disabled poet, ATA-Certified Translator (Spanish to English), and mixed-media artist. Her translations of Peruvian poet Blanca Varela’s work have appeared or are forthcoming in The New England Review, Poet Lore, Contemporary Verse 2, december magazine, and The Los Angeles Review. Liana has authored a full-length collection of poetry, Seeking the Pink (Kelsay Books), as well as two poetry chapbooks. She holds a BA in Spanish Language and Literature and a Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

 

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Julia Conner translates Paloma Chen

Nothing

These so-called ‘enemies’ were, at least to my mind,
simply different names for sensitivity and intellect.
—Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Only a curtain of skin separates us from the other folk.
The ear of the dying, dry wax softened
to the rhythm of the old world.

The weaver-spider exits your ear.

She staples your eyelids.
Your eyes are erupting
(She keeps them in her pockets.)

Liquor joins us and the fever
under a sky
bluer for some than for others.

Kill a rooster and seal our friendship
with blood and aguardiente.

Everyone chasing chimera, flesh torn
from stars,
shut in closets with false bottoms.

Debate is a cliché one learns to master
copying and pasting.
I a m n o t i n t e r e s t e d.
What I’m doing is drawing up strategies to dynamite
the nuclear family.

This is my conclusion:
tenderness is more powerful than rage,
but only by force.

We will swallow a shooting star to attain
the composition of helium. Vanishing
won’t be necessary because we will strike
to paralyze birth.

 

Nada

Los pecados capitales son solo otros
nombres de la inteligencia y la sensibilidad.
—Akutagawa Ryunosuke

Solo una cortina de piel nos separa de lxs otrxs.
El oído del moribundo, cera seca reblandecida
al ritmo del viejo mundo.

La araña tejedora sale de tu oído.

Grapa tus párpados.
Tus ojos están en erupción
(Se los guarda en los bolsillos).

Nos une el licor y la fiebre
bajo un cielo
más azul para algunxs que para otrxs.

Mata un gallo y sella nuestra amistad
con sangre y aguardiente.

Todxs persiguiendo quimera, carne arrancada
de estrellas,
encerradxs en armarios con doble fondo.

Debatir es un cliché que se aprende a dominar
copiando y pegando.
N o m e i n t e r e s a.
Yo lo que estoy es trazando estrategias para dinamitar
la familia nuclear.

Esta es mi conclusión:
la ternura es más poderosa que la rabia,
pero solo a golpes.

Nos tragaremos una estrella fugaz para conseguir
la materialidad del helio. No hará falta
desvanecerse porque nuestra huelga será
paralizar el nacimiento.

 

Translator’s Note:

“Nothing,” or “Nada,” comes from Paloma Chen’s Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Letraversal, 2022). As a Chinese American translating a Chinese Spanish collection of poetry, I resonate closely with the commentary on translation and belonging. Chen plunges the reader into the ambiguous crevice between Spanish and Mandarin, aware of the gazes of both Chinese relatives and Spaniards encountered on the street. My process aims to reflect the perspective on translation embodied in the text, embracing a starting point of uncertainty to reconstruct the Chinese diaspora identity through the self-gaze.

I am drawn to “Nada” for its sense of trappedness, and with that, a lurking explosiveness. “Nada” reflects the collection’s demand to take hold of this explosive energy, to turn the sourness of unbelonging into a drive to redefine one’s reality. In translating this poem, I pay particular attention to the colliding threads of destruction and creation, following Chen’s vision of language as a point of genesis.

Spanish-speaking readers encounter “lxs otrxs,” a gender neutral and nonbinary way of writing “the others,” and pronounced in Chen’s recording as “les otres.” The use of the x is singular; perhaps its appearance is jarring, but does not feel surprising. These choices are consistent with Chen’s tendency to make poetry out of everyday language and everyday language into poetry: language is always evolving, and words that seem new and strange when they first receive mainstream attention can become the norm. With this in mind, I aim to highlight “lxs otrxs” without unduly alienating them. In the translation, I use “folks” as a word bearing a similar usage in US English. While “folks” has certainly become more normalized in US English than the x has been in Spanish, it nonetheless aims for a similar intentional inclusivity.

In this poem, violence is central, yet casual, simply par for the course. There are by turns tearing, killing, and shutting. When translating “debatir es un cliché que se aprende a dominar / copiando y pegando,” I stuck to “copying and pasting.” “Pegando,” however, can also mean “hitting” or “striking,” adding a layer of violence to the meaning of debate learned through unoriginal means. I chose copying and pasting to strengthen a tone of despised banality, sharply contrasted when the speaker declares the intent to explode the norm of the nuclear family.

All of this explosive potential boils down to a defined purpose, which emerges as though it were foresight. A resolute future tense puts power into the hands of the speaker, compounded by the use of a collective first person. In translating, it is this sense of purpose that becomes the most crucial, and to remember that this explosion ignites not for the sake of destruction, but for the creation of a life on self-defined terms.

 

Paloma Chen is a Spanish-Chinese journalist, poet, writer and researcher. She has published the poetry collection Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Letraversal) and the multilingual poetry app Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景. Her poems have been included in anthologies like Matria poética: una antología de poetas migrantes (La Imprenta, 2023) and Última poesía crítica. Jóvenes poetas en tiempos de colapso (Lastura, 2023).

 

Julia Conner is a Chinese American educator, writer, and translator from the United States South. Her translations and interviews have appeared in Action Books Blog, Asymptote Blog, and Poetry Northwest.

 

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