*

Wrench of day
Unqualified return & glean &

Be that summarizes
Being

Misread Workers of the real
Realm open to (and proper to)

Hurts of here and near
Sugar and its gender

The opposite as true
The Ballad Of The Fallen is music

*

A sort of economy a sort of concordance

as if repetition solved
the problem of translation

*

We managed to throw this that cobblestone
& always ended

with the cobblestone heavy
as signifier

in a given system of flowers

*

Gastarbeiter as bad abstraction
Perform who that thorn in segue

Act historians of meaning

One pile tells it in a terse aim:

scribes of unaccompanied labour

*

In your dream eros was a concept
a recursive sea

with birds portrayed all over
long half-life forms

echoic birds fixed
in time not fixed in reception

*

World at the level

convey the difficulty
of knowing non-linear birds

ligatures their
semi-secretive semi-public character

exactly mimicked

read aloud and
perhaps ignored by deer

*

Are you working two jobs or building a career

on a boarded-up

storefront the words even the small

nouns

boarded-up


Born in Mexico in 1978, Hugo García Manríquez is a poet and translator. His most recent full-length collections are Commonplace (2023), originally published in Spanish as Lo común (2018), and Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (2015). He has translated William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (2009); George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (2019); a collection of essays and poems by Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas (2021); After Lorca y otros poemas, an anthology of Jack Spicer’s work (2022), among others. He lives in Oakland, California.