the Buenos Aires Review » Poetry

Andrea Durlacher

Martín Felipe Castagnet — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 16:06:21 +0000

Andrea Durlacher
Translated by Anna Rosenwong

It’s something no one regrets.

Menacing rituals arrive like an avalanche

and social norms.

Their arrival scares off any afternoon idle.

Shut the doors.

We’re cast down defeated in moonlight.

In turn

the reckoning.

I hope the moon

doesn’t draw us toward violent times.

I was never violent

and I won’t turn violent now.

As for you I love you moonless

in the sin of your own courage.

The letters of each syllable sink

in my room monsters surge back to life from a word.

Isolated birds

in scattered cages.

I remain.

I regard my thoughts.

Image: Eloisa Ballivian

Zweifel

Martín Felipe Castagnet — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 18:51:20 +0000

Martín Gambarotta
Übersetzt von Timo Berger

Hier ist das Wasser anders, die Schuppenblätter

der Artischocken sind anders, alles ist

im Wesentlichen anders

aber der, der eine Flasche aus dem Kühlschrank fischt

und sie auf die Arbeitsplatte stellt, ist

grundsätzlich derselbe.

Ihr, die ihr euch für die Konfrontation

entscheidet, ihr die ihr euch für

die Konfrontation entscheidet, ihr

die ihr euch für die Konfrontation entscheidet

Ihr die ihr euch für den Nachhall entscheidet, ihr

die ihr euch für den Nachhall entscheidet, ihr, die

ihr euch für den Nachhall entscheidet.

Ihr, die ihr euch für den Zweifel entscheidet, ihr

die ihr für den Zweifel entscheidet, ihr, die ihr für den Zweifel

entscheidet.

Ihr, die ihr die für die Anomalie entscheidet, ihr

die ihr für die Anomalie entscheidet, ihr, die ihr für die Anomalie

entscheidet.

Ihr, die ihr millimetergenau eure Handlungen

messt, ihr, die ihr millimetergenau

eure Handlungen messt, ihr

eure Handlungen messt.

Fünfzehn Monate, drei der Monate

um den Rest der Monate zu entschlüsseln

deine Monate, das heißt im Norden der

Monate war nichts.

Ich schließ mich der Gewerkschaft

des Zweifels an

ich schließ mich

der Gewerkschaft des Zweifels an

ich schließ mich der Gewerkschaft

des Zweifels an

Ihr, die ihr fähig seid zu materialiseren, ihr

die ihr fähig seid, zu materialisieren. Ihr, die ihr fähig seid

zu materialisieren.

Ihr, die ihr den Nutzen nicht versteht

stundenlang, ganze Tage Vögel

mit Fernstechern beobachtet zu haben und

ihre Namen in Bestimmungsbücher einzutragen.

Die Vogelart

gut zu kennen

bevor man sie benennt

ist die einzig ehrliche

Form

sie zu benennen

als er sah

was vier wilde Papageien

schienen

im rasenden Flug

durch die schütteren Palmen

eines Platzes

und unisono: grüne

Jagdflieger

in Miniatur

Zickzack fliegend

um zusammen Tel Aviv

in den Himmel zu schreiben

konnte er deshalb

die Erfahrung

nicht gut verdauen

Der flüchtige Schachspieler in einem Vergnügungspark

Die Haarspalterei verzerrt den Blick

Es ist nicht der Moment, die Artischocke

auf eine makellosen Arbeitsplatte aus Edelstahl zu legen

und es ist nicht der Moment zu untersuchen

warum er keine Artischocke

auf die Arbeitsplatte gelegt hat: Es ist nicht der einziehbare Moment

der alles zurückversetzende Moment, der Moment

jedem Monat eine Farbe zuzuweisen

der Moment des schwarzen Lappens, der über

seinem Kopf flattert.

Wenn du willst

dass dein Zuhause

Babylon ist

ohne Visum

kannst du nicht

singen

wenn du dich nicht

auf eine Plastikstuhl

setzen möchtest

wenn du singt

gibt man dir kein

Visum.

Er ist nicht hier

ist Mazze

holen gegangen

er ist nicht hier

ist für ein Bad

zun Fluss gegangen

er ist nicht hier

ist sich in der Leere

drehen gegangen

er ist nicht hier

ist aus der Kälte

in die Kälte gegangen

* *

Go back to the English

* *

Bilder: Delfina Estrada, “Campo de batalla” [Schlachtfeld]

Dubitation (a selection)

Martín Felipe Castagnet — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 15:44:36 +0000

Martín Gambarotta
Translated by Alexis Almeida

Here, the water is different, the artichoke

leaves are different, everything is

in essence, different,

but he who takes the bottle from the refrigerator

and puts it on the table is

basically the same

You who choose

confrontation, you who choose

confrontation, you

who choose confrontation.

You who choose reverberation, you

who choose reverberation, you who

choose reverberation.

You who choose dubitation, you

who choose dubitation, you who choose

dubitation.

You who choose anomaly, you

who choose anomaly, you who choose

anomaly.

You who measure your actions

milimetrically, you who measure

your actions milimetrically, you

who measure you actions milimetrically.

Fifteen months, three of those months

to decode the rest of the months

your months, which is to say north of those

months there was nothing.

You who are able to materialize, you

who are able to materialize. You who are able

to materialize.

You who don’t understand the benefit

of having spent long hours, entire days

with binoculars watching birds and

recording their names in a notebook.

To know the species

of the bird well

before naming it

is the only honest

way to name

so when he saw

what seemed to be

four wild

parrots in a low

flight between the thin

palms in the plaza

in unison: four green

fighter-bombers

in miniature

zig-zagging

as if to write Tel Aviv

together in the air

I couldn’t

digest well

the experience

The fugitive chess player in an amusement park.

The trichotomy that distorts sight.

It’s not the moment for putting the artichoke

on an immaculate metal table

and it’s not the moment for digressions

about why he didn’t put the artichoke

on the table; it’s not the retractable moment

the regressing moment for everything, the moment

to assign a color to every month

the moment of the flaming black rag

over his head.

If you want

your house to be

Babylon

without a visa

you can’t

sing

if you don’t want

to sit in a

plastic chair

if you sing

they won’t give you a

visa.

He’s not here

he went to buy

unleavened bread

he’s not here

he went to bathe

in the river

he’s not here

he went to rotate

in the void

he’s not here

he went from the cold

into the cold

Image: Delfina Estrada, “Battlefield”

Condensed Water

Martín Felipe Castagnet — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 17:34:07 +0000

Anja Kampmann

About the Sea

The horizon is the concern here the

distance applying color the bright crackling

of surfaces of light and the spreading

of the light as it surges the sea

within its broad chest the putrid sludge

of the fishmeal factories the sea of romantic

fires on the gravel beaches travelers

now losing themselves forever

in a distant view the sea in the harbors, the docks

the container areas licking the sea

beneath cranes all heaving the

homesickness nightwards the sea of moray eels

lurking back behind a rock

the sea of the deep with a hidden image

for the dreams of the sea

that vanished in the sea bottomless

the trenches above it all a mosaic of flakes

streaming tough thick field of dirt the sea

that is so well concealed gasping for air within

its broad chest and snatching at

itself.

translation: Wieland Hoban

borderland

we had thaws in the brighter hours

we knew no cold only the ladders

led high and higher into the tree where the fruit

hung in groups the leaves scented the thinner branches

only so much was left of the view weariness

in your bones on the scale the hours were

measured the sun lay in all the reddish skin

we collected in the border region only the hollow

bucket full in which memory dwelt a

reddish ground next to the trees like clamor

as the sun finally declined.

translation: Anne Posten

of kaliningrad you kept

the semolina pudding the tin pot in the morning

at boarding school the dogs the wild ones with broken

tails and finally a ship

that came toward you distant and far later

in the harbor the shadows of caps broke

the view broke behind collars

the weeks out between war and marine

lay miles up sea and halls so narrow

and potatoes so many and only

the screeching of gulls.

translation: Anne Posten

Lightly

is summer

distance writes

the letters of your memory

with a light touch

While a certain Ferris wheel

lifts gondola after gondola

into the air

So too is the night

namely the rising

of an approximate language

condensed water

and so are the days

namely more like forgetting

the averted glance when

the early evening soaks into your clothes

the transitions to earlier

which you become

more like. Drifting on this old steamship toward the Atlantic, Cuba

so are the days

lightly –

the gondolas fall

fall like each step

type cases with dried moths

a collection

that fades away like a whipcrack in the dark.

translation: Anne Posten

* *

Read this in German

* *

Images: courtesy of Frank Berendt

A Mistake

Lucas Mertehikian — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 02:44:59 +0000

Zheng Chouyu
translated by Qiaomei Tang

I traveled through the South Land
A longing face blooms and fades like the lotus flower with the seasons
The east wind is yet to arrive, the willow’s March catkins are waiting to fly
your heart is like the small, lonely, walled city
like an alley of blue-green cobbles facing the setting sun
the crickets are not crying, the windows are drawn in March
The hooves of my horse clatter — it’s a beautiful mistake
I’m not coming home, I’m only passing through

READ THIS IN CHINESE

Image: Zhang Daqian, Sceneries of Jiangnan

Anthony Madrid

heather — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:08:30 +0000

7.
There was an old person whose zeal
Made him bug-eyed and tense at the wheel.
He wasn’t much fun, and they said he was un-
representative of their ideal.

* *

19.
There was an old man from Sichuan,
Who directed the kids on his lawn.
He was rather aloof, and would sit on the roof,
And descend only when they had gone.

* *

40.
There was a young person named Wheeler,
Preserved in a jar of tequila.
“I’m a gnat! I’m a gnat!” was the comment of that
Hymenopterous person named Wheeler.

* *

52.
There was a young man from St James,
Who consigned all his work to the flames.
When asked why he did it, he sadly admitted
It’s one of his dumb little games.

* *

69.
There was an old man from Seattle:
Four fifths of his life was a battle.
He argued and fought, but eventually thought,
“It is time to desist from the battle.”

* *

Images: Michael Hollander

Ada Limón

heather — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:58:46 +0000

The Problem with Travel

Every time I’m in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe
in the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we’re small
and flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I’m going, all over again.

* * *

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds

My ex got hit by a bus.

He wrote me in a text to tell me this.
____Now will you talk to me? I got hit by a bus.

He even sent me a link to the blurry footage on the news.
I never wanted to see him come to harm, or watch it.

Oh maybe a little cockroach infestation.
____Little aliens all over the clean, misleading counters of his life.

My ex, a few exes before that, died
____of a heroin overdose.

After someone hurts you, it’s easy to imagine
him fading into the background of the bad film’s revenge plot.

It’s the joke, right? I hope you get hit by a bus.
____I swear I never thought it. No seed of transportation deviance.
No tampering with the great universal brake wires.

I wanted this rusty mailbox,
out here in the boondocks, this man, and this dog,
a little money now and again, some good news.

I’m the hidden bug in the tall weeds,
lighting fires no one can see.

When we moved out here together, I kept apologizing
for everything, like a poor orphan in the film about my shame.

He had to tell me to stop. And for days, (maybe weeks?)
I’d hear it in my mind and have to hold it there,
stuck like a cockroach under a glass,
waiting for someone braver to kill it.

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don’t.

In the text from my ex about the bus, he sounds almost funny.
____Like isn’t it ironic that I got hit by a bus, when all I ever wanted was to
disappear without a trace.

When the plane went down in San Francisco,
I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,
____the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:
The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned
that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it,
I love the way men love.

I used to pretend a lot. I’m very good at it.

I bought a creamy corn-colored rotary phone
and I was so fabulous.

I’d sit and tell you about my phone, but the truth was
____it didn’t work very well. It made me not want to talk to anyone,
but rather be in a picture, holding the phone, pretending to talk.

That’s not unlike some of the people I have claimed to love.

I’d rather tell you about them, stranger, in hot words
____than tug the cold satellites closer for warmth.

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes—
____part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

What I saw in the men who came before,
____sometimes I don’t want to say this out loud,

was someone I could hold up to my ear
and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into,
and have it returned in the inky waves.

Why are we forced into such small spaces together?
____This life in a seedpod.

I remember once, my ex and I, driving in his van.
He pointed out his ex wife walking.

She looked like me—not her blue hat, or her smallness,
but how deliberately she was walking away from the speeding vehicle.

Now, there’s a twisty summer storm outside,
and I desire nothing but this storm to come.

The calm voice on the TV tells us to stay safe.
Says, Stay safe and seek shelter.

* *

Image: Stacia Brady

Kenneth Pobo

Pola Oloixarac — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:47:50 +0000

BERGMAN’S SUMMER WITH MONIKA

At work, she’s a game
guys play between loading boxes,
her home, cramped, noisy.

She and her lover sail
under a high arch
into an archipelago,

summer brief,
a match blown out.
Food gone, she returns

to the mainland
with child. To the dark.
Winter. Bored,

she looks for men.
Sun, jailed in snow–
others raise her daughter.

MOONFLOWER ON THE PORCH

I dream I’m with another man.
Who I meet in the Boscov’s
furniture section
on a bubblegum-colored couch.

I say I already have a guy. He says
so what? Startled, I wake up,

you still sleeping. Life
gets normal again. Cats. Coffee.
The Dave Clark Five a needle drop away.
A late summer moonflower’s
ghost on the porch.

PESSOA MEETS WHITMAN ON HEAVEN’S PATIO

Good evening, friend. How long
have you been here? Over 100 years?
I understand you. And
misunderstand as much.

We’re comrades.
Didn’t we sleep together once,
share a dream, ecstatic,
scary? I wanted it to return,
but you were revising in New Jersey.

Have you seen God yet?
I hear he never even changes
the ash trays. I saw,
I think, Peter shaking
hands with some visitors,
a politician working the crowd.

What? You miss Long Island?
I kicked Lisbon’s sorry ass,
then fed it the best oranges. I see
someone waits to speak to you,

handsome too. I snuck your book in,
have eternity to read it.
I’ll never get to the end.

A DOZEN YEARS

I’ll be 70, you 72. I’m picturing us
on the porch, cats who will probably
outlive us vigilant for moths.
After you say you’ve never found
the perfect place to plant tomatoes,
I say I’ve never found the perfect place
to plant dahlias. Let’s stop this

looking for perfect places, the moment
a butterfly flexing on a purple buddleia,
then flying off. We’re still sitting.

Image: Moa Karlberg, from the series “The Closest to Heaven.” Curated by Marisa Espínola of Espacio en Blanco (more).

Derek Gromadzki

heather — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 05:44:17 +0000

KATABASIS SUITE

* *

Image: “Hoy viernes 122″ by Sergio Jiménez. Curated by Marisa Espínola for Espacio en Blanco. (More)

Luna Miguel

Pola Oloixarac — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:25:08 +0000

YOU HAD GLITTER ON YOUR FINGERS

I can hug the old refrigerator before they take it away.
I can write that you had glitter on your fingers and that burning glitter smells like a fairy tale.
I can bite the cat’s tail.
I can bite my husband’s beard, because it is mine, because it is mine and tastes like fruit.
I can cry and say that I’m crying, and not feel embarrassed by my pink cheeks.
I can be sappy.
I can dance naked with the windows open.
I can paint each nail a different color.
I can clean the house only once a week.
I can refuse to read the news.
I can refuse to hear the planes.
I can refuse to feed the mosquitoes with my thick, viscous blood.
I can invent a lullaby for deaf children, the only thing missing is a voice, the only thing missing is a long neck where we can resound.
I can say that we are scared.
I can say that hunger is an invention of our teeth so they don’t feel so alone.
I can write the word cancer a thousand times, because cancer reproduces a thousand times. It is a relentless killer, and I am also a relentless killer, and I swear I will get my revenge.
I can dream I’m kissing a made-up poet.
I can dream I’m a drop of acid rain.
I can use up all my Candy Crush lives until I finally feel that I have died. That I have died in the magical world of the candies.
I can leave the gas on.
I can light all the candles.
I can invite domestic catastrophes, cut off my finger, or cut off my nipple, or cut off a single hair and afterward eat up all my remains.
I can wish for a baby.
I can want a baby.
I can love the stupid and sweet idea of longing for a baby with all my guts.
I can make love with myself.
I can knock myself up with self-love.
I can say me, me, me, me, me and me, and still be here alone.
I can breathe underwater.
I can entertain myself with any fly.
I can collect photographs of my mother and stick her pale face on the wings of a dove.
I can fly.
I can fly.
I can set fire to everything when it pleases me.
The air here smells like fairy dust.
There is no more glitter.
There are no more sparkles.
I hug the old fridge.
There is no more body.

* *

Image: Luna Miguel