Three poems from Zona Dark (1991)

In Lima

In Lima anonymous dogs don’t exist
We all know their names, their faces and smiles
The crazy ones are our comrades in the streets of
Lima
They walk at our sides, shoulder to shoulder, and
            tooth to tooth
In Lima there’s a silent cop on every corner
and no one knows what he harbors in his secret black
heart
In Lima many of us know that things also
            die,
and that they are humbly extinguished in their poor, thinged
            lives
In Lima we all know that others will die
long before us,
and that with their eyes on ours they will say:
            “‘Til never”
In Lima the roosters crow too early, and
            beneath the sidewalks there are frozen sheets
hidden like the night of beautiful
            solitary bodies
and the clouds are marble cupolas on the horizon
            of winter days
In Lima we all know the precise sound of
            grinding teeth, and we are born cowards
to the marrow of our bones
In Lima the minibuses always arrive when it
            is already too late and they bring stories of failure in every
            letter of their route
and we sit to forget the whereabouts
            and we think in silence and without looking ourselves
            in the eye, because in Lima
everyone is a poet, and dances with their shadow as though they
            were the only couple, and readies their voice secretly at
            midnight


The clocks have been broken

These days of armed strike and famine,
days of knocked down minibuses and gobbled up
            diners,
when there is so much beer to drink,
these days, I’m saying, these days,
the spilt blood and beer
go to the head thirstier
These days in which death
is one more ornament for life,
the future’s hours have arrived in the present;
the clocks have been broken or they have been stolen.


Say of us

You who will come later,
so as to understand us, barbarous and old
historians of the future,
say of us that we were inhabitants
of a prehuman semi-divine, semi-bestial, precarious,
            world,
rich in certainties, rich in errors
That we inhabited a country in which the bonfires
            drew
the resplendent red of sickles and hammers on the nocturnal
hillsides
That we came from a time of taverns and
            irate slogans
screamed from beneath the water cannons
Say that our dogs were long and sad and
            cannibals
That at midnight in the Plaza de Armas
            Hunger spoke with Pizarro
That the plague received us in its bed and that it
           offered us refuge and we were like siblings
That we drank with Death and War at
            the same table and laughed together
That we made poems and spit out that we
           were tubercular and that we hated
            each other
That we betrayed and were betrayed that we signaled
            ourselves with a finger and that the sky in
            October was purple and red
That we raised our voices to shout that we
            killed ourselves and reproduced and that many
            died and didn’t realize

 

Montserrat Alvarez is a Peruvian poet, born in Spain and currently living in Paraguay. She is the author of, among other books, Zona Dark (1991), Alta suciedad (2005), and Bala Perdida (2007).

Judah Rubin is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum.