by Claudia Guerra Castillo (Zapoteco, Mexico)
translated by Margaret Randall

The House of Drunks
with love for you, Cintia

Bartender . . .
— Give me a glass of your honey
— Sit down, I invite you to dress in silence,
and get loneliness drunk — our loneliness —
pretend there’s no pain, that it’s what you expected.
Come kiss this night’s lips.
No one will reveal our name,
we are two thirsty souls.
— I want to love, to drink the last drops
of your drunken breasts,
cheers.
Here’s to you!
Here,
only drunken words commit suicide . . .
from Insurrección de las palabras, 2018.

Stephanie Borges (Brazil)
translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin

Imagine being more
than your body
the reading
of fingerprints, irises, traces
textures, not the soul
but to be the body’s refusal
to inhabit its cells
each flow and not be
your name zip code address
stop worrying
about proving you exist
and invent lives
since they don’t even see you as
a person

Imagine being the snake
that when shedding its skin
grows wings
and it wasn’t God
who provide them
so there’s no interest in
reaching heaven, but in flying
low, close to the sea
biting your own tail
being invisible
to radar, barely leaving
traces of feathers and skin
without worrying about
returning to dust.

Imagine time’s spiral
that the past is now
and the worst that can happen
is nothing
and we’re already here
in this desert so
any leap is movement
grow roots, duck–dive a save
slide into a hole
dig a tunnel
for the way is through
and alive and no one knows
how to get there
only maybe being another
with each step
so do it.

by Jorgenrique Adoum (Ecuador)
translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

The chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on an operating table
or clocks with eyes.
So you thought
the incredible had to be thoughtup.
But then you hadn’t been
in my country, in my countries, never knew
what happens in its landscape of colors
in cholera, for example a spurred
boot and a priest hat
on top of a cadaver, an Indian
to be precise, as if his history lice,
hailmary beads
weren’t enough? Oh mad symmetry of uniforms
in the humble dictatorship of the dead,
and the American everyday is so well known
we die it by heart too,
and hunger is so identical to old age
when it starts to undress us on the inside,
and there are important teeth biting
our earth, and the Virgin in a cap and leggings.
That’s like that, it’s like that, it’s like that more than what, more
America in the oblivion bodegas, more
echo bouncing back to the screamdoor,
searching out the guilt for us like a snake.
What did you know then if not these vignettes,
if not this atrocious crime carddeck,
not how you’d come up with nothing like the
dead man who died without saying a word, crying
the maggots he had left ever since
they’d given him a break from his killing.
But this is no painting or word
welldone: it happens, nothing more, after
mass, after Independence and other
longlasting tunes. But the blood,
not the cries, now has the word,
and better to laugh at the last of so much.

Jorgenrique Adoum (Ecuador)
translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

When I found out
(because I’m like that, someone who gets up
kicking and screaming, disinterring, puts on the body
left on the chair, the hope that didn’t
fit anymore like a bad set of false teeth, and leaves,
actually gets taken out, to see how go
the outthere days, how the insolent dictator
statue is, helmet up and helmet
down, carddeck animal, turning bad
bitch on his own account, bad communion host in the smitten
summer, bad stone in his dew, his memory,
just so the exile trips, scarcely
falling, barely, sees he’s mistaken,
that he’s wrong in his roots)
I woke up
afraid.
Where am I, I cried out, after
so much effort, how much longer
is it still before, what’s my name
then, why do I have a name.
(Because everything
smelled like always, old suffering, worthless
yesterday death, absurd
where remains linger of the cobwebbed
dinner, and still, still you’ve got to set
the table, waiters, lazy, customary
prophets, to put some backbone into the bread,
serve the poor’s breakfast, without so much
returning to today, mistaken date, I mean,
and so many centuries of not washing the napkin.)

And I couldn’t keep unlearning from utter
story and I couldn’t tighten the heartbelt
so it might hold on. It’s better we left,
my neighbor and me, to remake what’s broken, clothes,
to make ready the verges.
I still haven’t gone back
and I don’t know when I’ll die again: I haven’t got the time.