Aural

 

Gritty frost from
the radio speaker
in the car's
nomadic shadows:
a swamp of sounds
in which hearing's
needle can
barely move.
Out of nowhere,
a torch singer
slices through Wittgenstein
with the cutlery
of cante jondo...
How does she do it? -
unstitch, unseam
language itself,
make the world flow and
if that wasn't enough
hit the twin peaks
of grace and tragedy?
The car
anointed with music
slips into the night.

      David Huerta 

The Dream of the Stone

The dream of the stone is long and cold
its gray nature
kept nothing of the splendor of the fire.

How frightened I am by what goes off and remains!

Burning, quiet,
under the night of my senses
imprisoned
I only ask for heat.

How frightened I am by what goes off and remains!

                        

Dolores Castro 

Transl. by Toshiya Kamei

There Was No Plot

 

There were neither plots nor characters,
only places. Neighborhoods sliced
in half. Terraces and corridors
between roofless rooms. Profiles only. 
Staggered
spaces. Far off a group
was sucked up
into its own restlessness: the after-dinner
conversation, the waiting, shuffle between 
one door and another, shifts
in posture; remarks that from here,
where you hurried to leave, 
were already beyond hearing.

 

Coral Bracho

Transl. by Forrest Gander

La Extranjera

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

The Stranger
Gabriela Mistral