Daisy Zamora (Nicaragua)
translated by Margaret Randall

When I see them go by, I sometimes ask myself: what
must they feel, those women who decided to be perfect,
to preserve their marriages at any cost no matter how
their husbands turned out (party–animal, womanizer,
gambler, always looking for a fight, loudmouth, violent,
madman, deviant, perhaps abnormal, neurotic, bully,
completely unbearable, ignorant, deadly, boring, brute,
insensitive, slovenly, egomaniac, only out for himself,
disloyal, cheat, thief, traitor, liar, raping their daughters,
torturing their sons, king of the house, tyrant everywhere)
but they endure it all and only God above knows what
they suffer.

When I see them go by, slowed and dignified, their sons
and daughters long gone, alone in the house with that man
they once loved (perhaps he is calmer now, doesn’t drink,
barely talks, just sits in front of the television, shuffles
around in his slippers, yawns, sleeps, snores, gets up early,
is ailing, half–blind, harmless, almost childlike) I ask myself:

Do they dare imagine themselves, one night, guiltless widows
dreaming they are free at last and coming back to life?

by Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua)
translated by Alba Stacey Hawkins

Outside,
night lurks,
like a tiger crouching
to leap through the window.
In this room where
hard at work
I pull words from the air,
I am amazed by the sudden desire
for a soft
kiss
on my leg.

There is no one here.
My body is here alone
while I am with them
silent witnesses
women my fingers know
as they enter at night
with the breath of the moon.

Women of the ages
inhabit me:
Isadora dancing in her tunic.
Virginia Woolf in a room of her own.
Sappho leaping from the rock.
Medea. Phaedra. Jane Eyre
and my friends,
refusing to fade over time,
writing themselves
coming out of the shadows showing their profiles
finally seeing themselves
free of all constraint.

Women dance in the lamplight.
They climb onto tables. They give incendiary speeches.
They besiege me with suffering. Marks on their bodies.
Childbirth.
Silence of warm kitchens.
Ephemeral, tense bedrooms.

Towering women.
Monumental women surround me.
They recite their poems. They sing. They dance.
They reclaim their voice.
They say: “I could never study Latin. I could never write like
Shakespeare.
No one supported my love of music.”
George Sand: “I had to disguise myself as a man.
I wrote hidden in a male name.”
And before that, Jane Austen
composing the words to “Pride and Prejudice”
in a notebook, in the church’s vestibule,
repeatedly interrupted by visitors.

Women of the ages,
solemn
mature
gentle
whose shimmering eyes
envelop me
mortal immortals
in their unearthly bodies,
they seem to take pleasure
observing this room of my own,
the unused ream of white pages,
the modern word processor,
bookcases,
dictionaries.

I glance over at the linen closet,
my silky lingerie on the dresser.
I notice the shopping list on the nightstand.

I still feel the desire
for a soft
kiss
on my leg.

Nancy Morejón (Cuba)
translated by Margaret Randall

What we fall in love with are her black hands
like ferocious horseflies
illuminating the Apostle’s temples
as she drapes his shoulders
in the buzz of proud palms.
Paulina Pedroso possesses a noble soul.

A gentle breeze passes, unsettling the sky,
light falls across the border
and the gesture relieves Jos  Mart ’s pain.
I would like to have been there: the gallop, the swamp,
on horseback and with a straw hat
but her gaze moves over that marine dusk
that comes in from the small cays,
almost all of them the size of Paulina Pedroso’s hands
in brilliant archipelago.

Paulina Pedroso,
black woman of gold who professes her independence
when she clasps the man of The Golden Age to her breast
while the bells of the brasses and a drum
sound in the ears of her husband Ruperto
as if the young anthem
of Pinar del Rio’s tranquil mountains
and the sublime edges of Tampa . . . in springtime.

Paulina Pedroso possesses the noble soul of the islands.

Nancy Morejón (Cuba)
translated by Margaret Randall

Blind Poem without a Mouth
what happens to the cane field
in the hurricane?
— Kamau Brathwaite

I can’t see and don’t have a mouth. I wouldn’t want one.
I can’t see, nor do I have a mouth. And I don’t want one.
I am a black body, washed by raindrops,
swaying among the yagruma trees
without mouth without eyes
tossed upon the cane field’s tall weeds
waiting for the scabby auras.
Black is the skin of the woman who howls louder
than the hurricane’s eye, beside my body
without eyes, without a mouth and without a noose
but with her memory intact
flying to the heavens
to anchor her pain on the shores of Gor e
or to keep on flying, blind as my soul,
over Congo’s plains
until it finds sure refuge tossed by winds,
rains, sparrows and heartless willows.