Roxana Crisólogo

Tr. Cole Heinowitz

Editor’s note: This translated excerpt is taken from Roxana Crisólogo’s book Ludy D, published by Ediciones Flora Tristán in 2006.

i was a girl

my first poem resounded
in the ears of my neighbors
like a street vendor

everything we can use
spreads out across the broad barbed
tongue of the afternoon

if there had been water to wash
the sun’s silken mane
the goldsmith’s weft desire
garrisoned in the public squares of this immobilized
existence

    oh thighs of leafless dunes
to cross the tapestry of mist
the palms impregnate
with the incomprehensible industriousness
that restrains the moon
    from blowing its brains out
                                    it’s true
there wasn’t any water to grow a garden
the desert was that humanity
                        and the dust
my mother pushes with her broom

dishes washed in the room next door

a ball of voices bounces in the backyard
children unknown
who from time to time a woman
tells to go to school

what if the infection or indifference is so advanced
the only option is to tear it out by the root?
what would it be like to find yourself one morning
suddenly empty
would some sound detach
some stubborn wrench screw in?

and what about the army of ants that will no doubt
come for the leftovers?
will some old pot snore out its accumulated complaint
of historical blackness?

i’d expected to become accustomed
            to these pains
which looks like it’s going to be quite difficult
which from time to time kicks me
            into the corner
a politically incorrect hopelessness
with his sickle and claw hammer
and a salute to the formless
            flag

jeremías huamán poma

i didn’t know he was dead
until they found his rustic teacher’s staff
in a mass grave
south of lima
yauyos
to be exact
and his colleagues wrote his name
on one of the blackboards of the school of letters

    disappeared
date he was taken away
    at dawn
            as stated in the police report

they took jeremías without clothing or documents
from the plot he was tilling
three days later he was believed dead
i didn’t know him
i’d heard of him the night before
pure chance
my sister was coming back from the uni with that strange
smell of wet grass
and sun-kissed hair
or meager refectory food

jeremías had left the faculty
because he’d been offered an appointment in a small town
near the emergency zone
he was sparing
he never found comfort in the word
he found a scar inside his name

i wanted to know the world

and i got to the factory
where the world begins
where this factory ends
good morning tell me
if i have to bury my hands deeper
to squeeze the worm’s heart

that morning i received a phone call
it was rocío

rocío
     i’m lost somewhere in the house
it’s too late    my body is luminous
cough    haze    the gray of the factory
tracing bicycle rims in the sky
has passed over me    i am its corpse

i’d forgotten the rigidity of its lead fuselage
the deep iron of every twisted thing that
will crest the rooftops
and split me into the skull of a little saintrose
children hurl stones at and clouds conceal
like an imperturbable god
in his manger of works

wires for hanging
corrugated panels for escaping
you had to throw a rock and measure
the depth of this leguminous drop
the horizon reflected in a few stray crab
legs the sandbar offers
and a leaden mise-en-scène
will leave us as a condition

for i too hang from one of the air’s
crochet hooks and like the sun
i see myself saying goodbye to the youthful passage
of the factory trucks
perched atop an island

while the climbing vines of our words
lynch the irrevocable passage of smoke
and the dust takes my hands to curl up inside
like a fruitless dream of leaves
the hair of unknown children the trucks
mechanically extract and impact
in an outright mantra

what if i were like them
if i were a mantra
a repetition an excavation?

the coming and going of those children
with no more imagination than a key
that resists and tightens
returns to its place and loosens
but doesn’t want to go

four benches

that some kids dress up as a horse
i’ll bet you anything the rain will never come

the shore has laid out its carpets
of human invasion
its peruvian flag
on the nursery backs
of women

its thrombosis of inaccuracy
in the cumbia
that sweat traces
in their troubled marmalade
eyes

and the light
more distortion than measure
stitches in shades of drudgery

until even the name
p o v e r t y
becomes cloying

there are days i can only stand the noise of construction sites

and the coffee won’t get sweet nothing could sweeten this coffee
and i’d like to be the virgin adorning the twilight peach fuzz
of a padded box
call myself pinkie pinkie rose
wear my hair long keep my tiny feet rosy
like a familiar dolly
and bring the boys on the construction crew
clean tupperware canisters of
stewed chicken and potatoes

my secret spice i’ll sell
and resell
with two hills of rice
bitter lettuce and chile à la something
should be sufficiently generous or sparing
sweating
bundles of clean clothes and a towel
for perspiration

and then to think of the finishing touches on the building
as the way i too will end
sealed walls and plasterboard skies
how i’ll be finished
solderings    brackets    plastic fixtures
            where i hit the wall
                                      anchor
                and terminate

don’t talk to me about maintenance and prevention
by hammers drills pathologies or forms
that bow their writhing serpent’s heads
and ask me to keep rolling

to feel myself in the erosion of this two-story ground
with no foundation
and paper over the noise of a passing swarm
of seagulls blind as the pain
of the first time