Today is very long, with or without a map, in its attempt at meaning. I didn’t dress up as a heroine or stop at Hotel Eden. Nor did I disguise myself as a cyclist, or hail a taxi to the revolution. Instead I buried myself like an object of adoration. (Befuddlement sharpens intelligence.) There must be some way, I thought, to hear the canaries of reality. Then, a reader walked by, and I went with him, simple as that, with a zoom from the shaded area. 

Hoy es un día larguísimo, con o sin mapa, en la intención del sentido. No me vestí de heroína ni visité el Hotel Edén. Tampoco me disfracé de ciclista ni fui a la revolución en taxi. En cambio, me dediqué a enterrarme como a un objeto adorable. (Desconcertada, la inteligencia aumenta.) Alguna forma ha de haber, pensé, de escuchar los canarios de la realidad. Después, pasó un lector a mi lado, y me fui con él, como si tal cosa, a un zoom de la zona oscura. 


*

What a morning, this sadness! What a quiet cataclysm, this aspiration for a soul! Where are the living? No doubt, no worries, they weren’t sitting in the shadow of the laden journey and distinguished dust. I checked, but they weren’t there. Not even as they are not, extra clusters on the branches of time or nests too bare to notice in the room of the world. It’s me, I thought, the only intellectual object left. Nothing happened after that, except a light groan that blew and looked on.

Qué mañana esta tristeza! Qué cataclismo insonoro esta ambición de ser alma! ¿Dónde estarán los vivos? Sin duda y sin pena, no estaban en la sombra que hacían el distinguido polvo y el viaje con todo a cuestas. Me fijé bien y no estaban. Ni siquiera tal cual no son, racimos superfluos en las ramas del tiempo o nidos demasiado escuetos para notarse en la habitación del mundo. Soy yo, pensé, el único objeto intelectual que queda. Nada más pasó, salvo un leve quejido que sopló y veía.


*

Nervous, because I want but don’t, and on top of that, my weary heart. Taking three Aspirin won’t fix anything, won’t help me just be. It’s been so long since I’ve crossed that invisible lip between this place and the worldless. Like a caress that comes too late, writing is strung out and obsolete: correspondence to stake a place that at some point, maybe, will bear my name. Look in my empty hands. Tomorrow everything will start over: the disordered soul, the scandalous body stitched to lewd syllables, lunatic passions.   

Nerviosa porque quiero pero no quiero, y además el corazón cansado. Tomar tres aspirinas no resuelve nada, no ayuda a simplemente ser. Hace tiempo que cruzo un labio invisible, entre aquí y ningún mundo. Como caricia que habrá llegado tarde, escribir es muy largo y obsoleto: una correspondencia para fijar un lugar que alguna vez, tal vez, tendrá mi nombre. Fíjense en mis manos vacías. Mañana empezará todo de nuevo, el desorden del alma, el escándalo del cuerpo cosido a sílabas profanas, a pasiones lunáticas.    


*

A journey to where I’m awaited, at the very bottom of myself, by something I own. It’s not all that impossible. I only need to cling to my white box, the dead little house of language. Commencing, for once, moon expeditions around my room. Would a siege like that be any use? Chattels for walking in my own flesh and being reconnected? So many things can squeeze into the shadow: artist costumes, serial killers, the sheer duration of where. I feel more destitute than ever but anyway, this sky of skies where I play in silence, frail as I am, the lute of my music. 

Un viaje a allí donde me espera, al fondo de mí misma, algo que poseo. No parece imposible. Debo insistir tan sólo en el casillero blanco, la pequeña casa muerta del lenguaje. Empezar, de una vez, la expedición de lunas alrededor de mi cuarto. ¿Asedio que me sea pródigo? ¿Enseres para andar carnal y ser reunida? Tantas cosas caben en la sombra: trajes de artista, asesinos seriales, la duración del adónde. Me siento más desprovista que nunca y aun así, este cielo de cielos donde resueno en silencio, cuan frágil soy, laúd de música mía.


*

It’s been many days, twenty years, that I’ve travelled north, and now I have insomnia that drags on from the day to the night of departure. Can some airplane ship me to consciousness? To this beast on the other side, locked in its four legs, between dozing institutions and the heart of the nation? Needles in the wind. Poetics split by fear. Abstract moon that asks for more more more.  

Hace muchos días, veinte años,  que viajo en dirección al norte y ahora tengo insomnio entre el día de partir y la noche de partir. ¿Qué avión podría llevarme a la conciencia? ¿A esta fiera del otro lado, encerrada a cuatro patas, entre instituciones que cansan y el corazón nacional? Agujas en el viento. Poética partida por el miedo. Abstracta luna que pide más y más y más. 


*

Argentine poet and critic María Negroni is the author of twelve books of poetry, two novels and five collections of essays in Spanish. Works in English include Mouth of Hell, Dark Museum and The Annunciation (all translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, published by Action Books).

Michelle Gil-Montero is a poet, publisher and translator of contemporary avant-garde Latin American writing. She is the translator of Poetry After the Invention of America: Don’t Light the Flower by Andrés Ajens; Mouth of Hell, The Tango Lyrics, and The Annunciation by María Negroni; and This Blue Novel by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso. She is the author of Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press). She is the publisher of the translation press Eulalia Books.

Art by Leif Holmstrand, from “Holy Helpers.”

ALLOWANCE

Mommy Mommy
Can I have a gun
to shoot down the butchers
of childhood
I need my own cash
to buy splooge grenades
& lethal fireworks
for rape holidays
Mommy
Why do you keep paying me
bullets to the skull

*

THE ACID KWEEN

I’ve gone rancid
In the boodlyjank
At meat o’clock
I expire
My skin drags magnetic south
My heart ulcers
are full of poodles
My scabbed scalp
is a screamer
My eyes buckle
in the plop shop
The whack of ages
& I’m being chummed
into a meat cloud
Stank oceans roil
Hell
is a ripe daughter

*

A MAGYK TONIC FOR THE NERVES

So I drink the blood of virgins
Who doesn’t
That’s patriarchy for you Who am I
to claim I’m on the outside
So I’m a bottom-feeder So what
Bottom’s up!
only means one thing
when there’s a boot on your neck

*

UNEXPECTED GUEST

I take my cream hard
I like my bloods stiff
with deathswoon
But that one
who just rolled up is
An annihilation
I’m eye-fucking
a marvel of a bucking
young Prince
at the height of
his clit-shaking powers



*

A TASTE OF VICTORY

Nom Nom Her swiney thumper
on a platter
tickles my brittle flank
My rank veins flash freak sugars
My skin pinks My clit perks
How now Magik Mirror

*

Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga and Pop Corpse! These poems are from SW, a restaging of Snow White.

*

Grave Piss Manifesto

Let me reiterate my repugnance

& reify the ashen body so I might piss on it in its entirety.

Dead dad died & all I got was this lousy imaginary eulogy.

Dead dad died from diner food & damnit

I want the heart heredity that doesn’t risk giving out

in the heat of the night

jammed past the hilt.

Hearts should be bloody

& hearts should

beat

& hearts should explode

& when incapable of taking in

the birdsong of ambient affections

blockages become prevailing wind.

Blowback unlimited

& I like to sunbathe in the puddles formed.

Sewerage is my favorite suntan lotion.

Daddy slathered hatred hightails it for the heavens when I try to attract it.

Daddy escapes atonement & speaking of skeletons

I can’t find a speck of soul to interrogate

nor an inkling of remorse to extend to projector

when he’s all ground to powder

& it doesn’t even taste good enough to season steak with.

I’m so hungry I could eat disparagement

& call it enough calories to get through the day.

In my moment of duress at the news of Dad’s eternal rest

I had nothing to do but laugh & get undressed.

Philharmonic harmonizing & the invisible din thud squeal

& the imaginings of mourning that must’ve been farcical

with snotty tissues balled up & volleyed

off a coffin I’m disinvited from viewing

despite my disinterest

& my morbid commitment to dignity.

I want dick for breakfast & dick for lunch & dick for dinner.

So much dick that clouds part

& on my knees blessings resounding & Gabriel’s horns screeching

Levi’s unzipping appear as fortuitous angels in the sky.

I look up & Dad’s whinging

Never forget. The heathen bull

does not fuck other bulls. Balls shouldn’t smack balls.

The earth trips off its axis in the presence of filth.






*


CJ Waterman is a writer living in Providence, RI. He holds a degree in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in Poetry from Notre Dame.  Other poems appear in Smoking Gluegun, Tarpaulin Sky, Similar Peaks and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a novel.