by Laura Delia Quintero Garcia

No fue un dolor previsto
tampoco intuición premonitoria
maduraba el amor
como madura el aire con la fruta
como el agua y el sol
en el árbol purisimo del día

Fue un dolor no previsto
relámpago obsceno
zarpa de hielo sobre el sueño
polvo que ambiciona el barro
y un soplo de luz
                           lo desintegra.

Neither an agony foreseen
nor intuited premonition
love matured
the way air matures around the fruit
like water and sun
on the purest tree of the day

It was an unforeseen agony
obscene lightning
the paw of ice on the dream
dust that just wants to be mud
gets disintegrated
                            by a gust of light.

— translated by Russ Sargent

by Laura Delia Quintero Garcia

I love the night–lit passages
that the roots take
the labyrinth of dreams
skeleton of time
where I search for you without eyes
and my voice     dark wave
unfolds like billowing smoke
longing for the heat of your insomnia
longing to attain
                           the unattainable.

Amo la noche y sus rincones
este camino de raices
laberinto de sueños
esqueleto del tiempo
donde a ciegas te busco
donde mi voz     ola nocturna
despliega espumas de humo
buscando el calor de tus insomnios
buscando alcanzar
                              lo inalcanzable.

— translated by Russ Sargent

by Taylor Mali

I don’t want to tell you what you already know
so I won’t tell you you’re going to die.
Even so there was a time
when such a revelation
would have felt a curse —
my mother told me not to cry,
that she, not I, would be the first
to die, which only made things worse.

And someone here will be the next to die.
This, too, must come as no surprise.
But this isn’t a poem about the death
of that person — the next in this room to die —
this is about something else instead: the very last
one of us here to join the dead.

He or she who outlives the rest.

When that day comes — and may it take its time! —
by then who will care or even know we all once met,
gathered to share stories, rhymes, wine, and bread?
The rest of us all dead, except you:
the last one to go.  When that day comes
who then will know?

I say we will.

We will be waiting for you in that other place
to do what we are doing now, face to face,
with whatever wine the dead have to drink,
what bread to eat.  We will greet you and say,

Welcome.  Come and eat.
And take, at last, your empty seat.

by Taylor Mali

Because men murder their wives every day;
because when a woman dies and it looks
like a tragic accident, a botched burglary
or even (in fact, especially) a suicide,
it too often turns out to have been her husband,
I wonder if, when the detective called
to tell me what had happened to Rebecca
(It seems your wife has taken her own life,
those were the words he used: seems
and taken her own life, not killed herself
or committed suicide instead, and nothing
more than seems even though she was dead);
I wonder if as I began to cry the tears I never cried
when first my father and then even my mother died;
I wonder if he was secretly taping my every word,
my breathing, the entire act of sorrow,
for playback at some future date
just to see if I sounded like an innocent man.

Because later, after the services,
after the shrine of flowers and candles disappeared
as suddenly as it had bloomed on the sidewalk;
after the medical examiner made her ruling
and I was allowed to break the tape that sealed
our apartment and walk in on her last night,
the scene of the crime, untouched except for the window
from which she had jumped, now closed,
but everything else — the small and final stones
of her ritual still lying in a cross on the floor,
goldfish floating dead in the fish tank;
even as I bagged and gave away her clothes,
invited friends to take what fit if they could
to remember; I wonder if I still — or ever —
was a suspect in her murder.
I think sometimes I should have been.

I don’t mean that I was there or opened the window for her;
gathered her screaming in my arms and let her go,
but rather by the small, sad cloud that hung
over her and which rained stinging, black,
and bitter tears on her–daughter–of–the–Holocaust head;
I knew that she would one day do this,
even — and I cannot stand myself for saying so —
even hoped she would in the same outrageous,
secret way you might hope a dog (like our dog,
the one she picked out herself
because he cowered in the back of his cage
as though he did not expect to be saved
from the shelter); in the very same way
you hope to god this dog will die
before you have to put him down.