Miriam Cano

"Motel"

 

This room is a motel.

The Bible in the drawer, you:

I read you crossways

under a cold fluorescent light

that obscures, behind flickers,

fragments of apocryphal gospels

that haven’t yet become required reading.

I am not given that part

of truth that you hide

under the hands that now take me.

The headlights of approaching cars

silhouette you against a wall yellow with smoke:

it’s your good fortune to open doors

and pay off old debts.

 

I wait for you with the faith of a soldier’s wife

who softens sheets with no sense of time

or certainties of return.

​

Carles Dachs

“Duna”

 

Duna pr. n. m. GEOG Danube

NTC Hungarian-English Dictionary

by Tamas Magay and Laszlo Kiss

 

Like the bank of a river that the river doesn’t touch,

the eye, always with the word in midstride,

sees the barren present, asks where space is going

so burdened with time, where they go,

with such riches, the veins of the woods,

and verse rakes up thought

and takes us out of the landscape:

how it costs us to have learned

that the body is merely moss

on the verge of destruction,

that the trunk of the year

turns in a circle

that never begins

and that we can harvest only grievances:

word, mud, dust, ash,

the handful and the caress,

palms open like wounds.

 

And still I haven’t been able, after so long,

to see the wooden water of the Danube

or the shadows of the ships that disturb it;

I don’t know the color of the deep fissures

the color that evening dyes

the coverlet of the wind.  I can say, this is certain,

the cold red of brakes and traffic lights

reflected on the asphalt, rain

running down the windows of the tram;

I hear them from here in the applause

of the storm having heard

the night like a cold stone

rubbing against my cheek when, nine Novembers ago,

we had the past present

right before us without knowing it:

like a lung the world fills itself,

like a lung our caress expands,

we made each other day by day

without a word echoing, without receding,

only the light speaking within life taking root.

We didn’t miss being anything more:  I felt the cold

in my breast of a boy playing hide-and-seek,

and between my hands the Roman smell

of climbing to the top of the hermitage;

the wind, a little farther away, still carried

the emptiness of our outlined bodies,

and nothing retreated to the nest

at the time, and nothing was asking

how many words mirages are worth;

we lay in the soft grass of a memory

newly born:

we were language before it was said

we were the river, not the water flowing down.

Maybe we are time when we pass by

and things are houses for words

that are emptied and filled, that are emptied

until only stillness remains,

the echo of the sizzling of memory;

maybe we are, at the end of our years,

the veins of ancient gray flames

upon the cold stone of night

that will rub someone else’s cheek,

or we follow hidden in a brief instant,

nothing more, a small gesture of the hand,

a smile of sun in a sliver of glass:

the impressions of the shape of life

just when they leave us.

​

Laia Llobera

“Ridding Myself”

 

I didn’t know how to rid myself of you.

When you love, you love forever.

Free from the forest.  Free from hands.

Entwined in boughs from the belly.

 

From this poem or that offering,

which feeds us now as it did before,

I have thrown down the burning shaded slope

and the sprout that sorrow raises up.

 

I have taken up the purest lament,

candle and heat of the lie,

and I have aimed them toward life,

toward the angel of love.

 

An offering

from the depths of the centuries

invites us.

 

And it drives us away,

with fresh new skin,

to a reborn star.

I didn’t know how to rid myself of you.

But neither have I wanted to.

 

You are present in every tear,

in every schism,

in the prows of my ports

and in the black pitch of the dead.

 

And on the stairs to heaven,

which are already ours.

 

In this way I defy the abyss.

​

 Maria Isern

“Untitled” (“Era el mar …”)

 

There was the sea.  There was the sea and there were feet, and your eyes

mutilating my feet in the water.  And there was you with your eyes

netting me like seaweed, and there was the sky that made shapes

and there was the prickly skin of my thighs, skin-coral streaked

with the fat of a little girl.  The sky making shapes.  The fish,

so many feet, skin and fat, the tear where fish entered in, where I learned

about seaweed.  And there was me, mutilated landscape, so like

a thousand-year-old beach with all the fish scattering themselves

before me across the bottom.  And everything rose up, and everything

was dyed with coral, and you were mutilating the water, the fish,

the seaweed, and I was engulfed by the sea and crushed sand

between my toes. And my ancient skin turned to sand.  And my self

was entirely sand.  And that is how I grew up.  I killed the fish, and I gave you

their eyes and their fear.  And the sand was lost to me.  And you told me

my skin like coral already was touch and stone, that we were

eyes burning already half blind like the stone the sea soothed, like

the lyrical streaks of a body. There was the sea, and with your gaze

you made me a sea in the limitless expanse of the whale,

its being a mineral abyss.  Because there was the sea and I thought

about an interminable whale beneath the boat, and my head

was the boat rocking against it and I did nothing any longer

with my limbs:  then there was the deep and shining destruction

of the seaweed.  There was the water of your insistent eyes, already,

outlining the skin of the waves. And I had grown beyond time

and beyond limit of your body, I had grown, like the sand,

murky and then raw material for a beach.