"...because now I'm descending to the anguished
touch of a miner..."


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Issue 10: Out on a Limb

Issue 9: The Missing Body

Issue 8: The Lily

Issue 7: Passages

Issue 6: No More Tears


A quick list to poets featured in this issue:

Robin Behn

Richard Garcia

John Hennessy

Adrian Matejka

Ayukawa Nobuo

Eunice Odio

Kathryn Rantala

Anna Ross

Mathias Svalina

Larissa Szporluk

Kevin Tsai

Eunice Odio
translated from the Spanish by Keith Ekiss
and Sonia P. Ticas

Declensions of the Monologue

I

I am alone
completely alone

between my waist and my dress
alone with my entire voice

with a cargo of slight angels
like those caresses which collapse
alone through my fingers.

A confused child of sand
seeks a blue canoe
amid my floating hair.

Holding their tribes of scent
with a pale thread

against a rose profile
thirteen pilgrims rush
to the quietest corner of my eyelids.

II

I arch lightly over
my heart of flowering stone
to see it,

to wear its arteries and my voice
in a given moment

when someone arrives
and calls to me . . .

but now I don't wish to be called,
I fit in the voice of no one,
do not call,

because I'm descending to the depths of my meagerness
to the satisfied roots of my shadow,

because now I'm descending to the anguished
touch of a miner, carrying his half-open flower
on his shoulder
and a big I love you on his belt.

I descend further

into the immediacies of the air

which hurriedly awaits the letters of its name
to be born perfect and habitable

I descend even further,

Who shall find me?

I wear my arteries,
(what great haste I have)

I wear my arteries and my voice
I wear this heart of flowering stone,

so that in a given moment

when someone arrives

and calls to me

and not finding me
lightly arched over my heart, to see it,

I will not have to go and leave my great voice,

and my high heart
of flowering stone.



_______________________________________________________________

Reception for a Friend on His Arrival
in Panama


I follow him
and anticipate his voice
because like mist
in uninhabited places
I have a watercolor vocation.

Tell me
how are the market goods there:

books,
roses,
swallow-shaped bells.

Apart from this,

And without looking at him
I ask

about geological mangos
bordering him with pulp

and about a new river

with cities of sound
and the Archangel's longitude.

Tell me as well about the small coast
where recently the day,
like a heavenly two-headed animal,
camped in two aquariums
and filled with fish.

Tell me if the trees welcomed you unanimously
like the time they elected the year's first lark
and the day of flowering.

Summarize it all now that I tremble
so gently
behind a swallow,

now that they offer me publically
for a butterfly nude

and I am like the roses
unsettling the air.

 



Translators' Bio Notes Keith Ekiss lives in San Francisco. His poetry has appeared
in such journals as Onthebus, The Tule Review and Zyzzyva.
His poems are forthcoming in Chelsea and in Place-Landscape-
Culture-Voices
(University of Iowa Press) an anthology
of Southwest poetry. With Sonia P. Ticas, his translations
of Eunice Odio are forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander
(Spring 2003).

Sonia P. Ticas is Assistant Professor of Language
and Latin American Literature at Linfield College, Oregon.

_______________________________________________________________
 

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