“Cut off his head and give back the hatchet”

Reina Maria Rodriguez (Cuba)
translated by Kristin Dykstra

The bathtub and the heating pipe
where you can entwine your neck
in a shoelace
if the body hangs one span
higher than its ideal for resurrection.
“Go back, go back in time”
— what the father wants —
to vindicate him.

I put the vase out
and take it back quickly,
because they died young
and flowers aren’t enough
to calm the anxiety.
It wasn’t a struggle
to put your head in the oven, Sylvia;
into the loop, Juan;
under a wheel–shaped paperweight,
my brother.
It wasn’t a struggle, Rom n
to hang from the wire
like a bird disemboweled
in the wind from the heater.
“The sensitive ones,” they say:
return, begin.
I remember Georgette
ascending the coast on her bicycle,
Maeterlinck riding behind.
The one thing I do is think about that moment
when I couldn’t hold you up
or save you from the axe.

from Poemas de Navidad [Christmas Poems], Bokeh, 2018