Poems from Wild
Latin American Literature Today, n 29, March, 2024
Photo: Rosario Acuña Loayza History
futile body
I could say skin hands feet flesh flesh
sex body history
you enjoy the other in two
absent revolted unexplored dry
valley smell of desire
incessant impulse or I take you
love me at the precise edge of your flank
inside or outside
feminine figure ding men celebration
delight sacred skin
or profane existence
without you
nothing
The 36th Day
I am not from this tribe
my paisanos, those of my ancestors,
they knew about this minuscule fragment
that launches us to the miracles
of fresh aromo and warming waters
from our women, our
grandparents, liberated the sorcerer
of the body in battle
that enjoys this little moment without limits
the paisanos of my ancestors
forgot the “you” that is lost when
the lizard of desire invades me
its pleasure doesn’t seem to be
part of this world
I don’t have anything
or anyone
to bite
Disco 13
If I write thirteen teenagers: Life is worthless,
they killed us or if I put
the police intervened or if I note that the women
didn’t have masks or if I describe how I helped them
in the road or I left them on the dance floor
perhaps no one remembers anything.
It is worthless. I have no strength, help me papi.
He’s dead.
Make room, sit down, fear that lives
in the arrest or the fine, the guilt with no mask.
Life. They come out one by one, they take out
injured bodies, they go back and take out corpses
they’ve closed the doors.
Everyone has died
suffocated. I am still drinking. Carajo,
it is worthless. Get me out!
I reanimate you but you no longer respond, the tono is cool.
Life, carajo, is worthless, tears like bullets
pisco beer damp cigar wet
all the bodies are wet
Life is worthless.
Life life life.
Life.
Besieged
I am outside the ruined tumult
you don’t feel the maro that circles the border
I review the frail blink of my vaporous life.
I move the soft finger. You lay me
you lay here
you said I am yours I said I am yours
and we never knew
of the silent island of the noon
that invaded our landscape
it waits at the borders
at the limits of disdain
and it still thinks of you
it walks
without rumba
it stops
Translated by Christian Elguera
Christian Elguera is a Lecturer in Spanish at The University of Oklahoma and a visiting professor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru). He has a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Languages and Literatures from The University of Texas at Austin. His research is concerned with the production and circulation of cultural translations by and about Amerindian peoples from the 16th century to present in Abiayala, particularly in Andean and Amazonian areas. His forthcoming monograph, Traducciones territoriales: defensoras y defensores de tierras indígenas en Perú y Brasil, analyzes poems, chronicles, radio programs, and paintings enacted by Quechua, Munduruku, Yanomami, and Ticuna subjects in order to defy the dispossessions, extermination, and ecocides promoted by the Peruvian and Brazilian States. Alongside his political interest in the struggles of Indigenous Nations, he researches the relationship between Marxism and the Peruvian Avant-Garde Poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, he will publish the book El marxismo gótico de Xavier Abril: decadencia y revolución transnacional en El autómata (Ediciones MYL, 2021
