Blessèd Are the Normal
by Roberto Fernández Retamar: Blessèd are the normal, those rare creatures
Spanish
Farewell to the Führer
Farewell to the Führer, farewell to all Führers who have been or who will be. Farewell to all Führers true or false, good night, I say, good night, With an intimate reactionary sadness Farewell to the Führer who gobbled Black Forest Cake while his tanks fed upon the roads of Europe. Farewell to all Führers …
Prayer to a Farm Worker
Rise up and look at the mountain, from where the wind, the sun, the water arrive. Thou, who determines the course of rivers, thou who scatters the flight of your soul. Rise up. Look at your hands. Join hands with your brothers, together in blood we go. Now is the time that can be tomorrow. …
To See Him Again
And never, never again? Not on nights packed with a few stars, or in mornings’ first slender sun or afternoons sacrificed to afternoons? Or at the edge of a pale road that surrounds the farm fields, or a rim of a trembling fountain, whitened by a moon? Or beneath the forest’s lush poplars where, yelling …
Things
“Copper from my land / black ceramics / from Pomaire / and Oaxaca / Pieces of the day / picked up / on passing / through the roads” |
by Renato Martinez
Film Viewed on Coney Island
Like a dragonfly shimmering within a jar, such is the woman held by your gaze. From her open hands there blossoms three flames. Petals that turn into thorns, thorns that turn into amethysts. At this hour, the violet of gasoline is the most sensible perfume; fire encircles the drawings of her body: mandorla. Slowly, the …
The Chair
On the chair a favorite book a dirty shirt a glass full of noise and thirst or a beach where dolphins of smoke are meditating Its wood has rested my bones insubstantial air international politics love I’m sick of traveling In this room which the Queen of England has never visited in this room which …
Lisa
by Roberto Bolaño: When Lisa told me she had made love / with another, in the eternal / telephone booth of life / in the market in Tepeyac, I thought the world / ended.
The Heavenly Poets
by Pablo Neruda: What have you done / you intellectualists? Rilkistas? / you fucked up mystifiers, fake witches?
The Tablets
by Nicanor Parra: I dreamed I was in a desert I was sick of myself