abstract

We open windows and doors with this translation in order to invite you to come inside a body and a personal climate, which are made of short-circuits between dreams and reality. Here, childhood's landscapes are incomparable with other ones. Here, Favor Ellis, with no breath, creates the breath; she injects oxygen into herself, through words. Writing, for her, is a method of breathing which lets her submerge within herself in order to understand the geopgraphical representation of her memory - portrayal of invisibilities, silences, fears, and dreams, turning the text itself into a biofeedback that does not splash but beats.

-Abstract for Breath / Técnica de respiración
by Mónica Ardila, Catalina Contreras, Rocío Gavilán & Andrea Vargas

subtext

At night, in the fish light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts
To stay warm, and litter the fields.
We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth.
Like us, they refract themselves. Like us,
They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.
Like us, the water unsettles their names.

Sometimes they lie like leaves in their little arks, and curl up at the
edges.
Sometimes they come inside, wearing our shoes, and walk
From mirror to mirror.
Or lie in our beds with their gloves off
And touch our bodies. Or talk
In a corner. Or wait like envelopes on a desk.

They reach up from the ice plant.
They shuttle their messengers through the oat grass.
Their answers rise like rust on the stalks and the spidery leaves.

We rub them off our hands.

Each year the dead grow less dead, and nudge
Close to the surface of all things.
They start to remember the silence that brought them there.
They start to recount the gain in their soiled hands.

Their glasses let loose, and grain by grain return to the river bank.
They point to their favorite words
Growing around them, revealed as themselves for the first time:
They stand close to the meanings and take them in.

They stand there, vague and without pain,
Under their fingernails an unreturnable dirt.
They stand there and it comes back,
The music of everything, syllable after syllable

Out of the burning chair, out of the beings of light.
It all comes back.
And what they repeat to themselves, and what they repeat to
themselves,
Is the song their fathers sing.

In steeps and sighs,
The ocean explains itself, backing and filling
What spaces it can't avoid, spaces
In black shoes, their hands clasped, their eyes teared at the edges:
We watch from the high hillside,
The ocean swelling and flattening, the spaces
Filling and emptying, horizon blade
Flashing the early afternoon sun.

The dead are constant in
The white lips of the sea.
Over and over, through clenched teeth, they tell
Their story, the story each knows by heart:
Remember me, speak my name.
When the moon tugs at my sleeve,
When the body of water is raised and becomes the body of light,
Remember me, speak my name.

The dead are a cadmium blue.
We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.

We layer them stroke by stroke
In steps and ascending mass, in verticals raised from the earth.

We choose, and layer them in,
Blue and a blue and a breath,

Circle and smudge, cross-beak and buttonhook,
We layer them in. We squint hard and terrace them line by line.

And so we are come between, and cry out,
And stare up at the sky and its cloudy panes,

And finger the cypress twists.
The dead understand all this, and keep in touch,

Rustle of hand to hand in the lemon trees,
Flags, and the great sifts of anger

To powder and nothingness.
The dead are a cadmium blue and they understand.

The dead are with us to stay.
Their shadows rock in the back yard, so pure, so black,
Between the oak tree and the porch.

Over our heads they're huge in the night sky.
In the tall grass they turn with the zodiac.
Under our feet they're white with the snows of a thousand years.

They carry their colored threads and baskets of silk
To mend our clothes, making us look right,
Altering, stitching, replacing a button, closing a tear.
They lie like tucks in our loose sleeves, they hold us together.

They blow the last leaves away.
They slide like an overflow into the river of heaven.
Everywhere they are flying.

The dead are a sleight and a fade
We fall for, like flowering plums, like white coins from the rain.
Their sighs are gaps in the wind.

The dead are waiting for us in our rooms,
Little globules of light
In one of the far corners, and close to the ceiling, hovering, thinking
our thoughts.

Often they'll reach a hand down,
Or offer a word, and ease us out of our bodies to join them in theirs.
We look back at our other selves on the bed.

We look back and we don't care and we go.

And thus we become what we've longed for,
past tense and otherwise,
A BB, a disc of light,
song without words.
And refer to ourselves
In the third person, seeing that other arm
Still raised from the bed, fingers like licks and flames in the boned air.

Only to hear that it's not time.
Only to hear that we must re-enter and lie still, our arms at rest at our
sides,
The voices rising around us like mist

And dew, it's all right, it's all right, it's all right...

The dead fall around us like rain.
They come down from the last clouds in the late light for the last time
And slip through the sod.

They lean up hill and face north.
Like grass,
They bend towards the sea, they break toward the setting sun.

We filagree and we baste.
But what do the dead care for the fringe of words,
Safe in their suits of milk?
What do they care for the honk and flash of a new style?

And who is to say if the inch of snow in our hearts
Is rectitude enough?

Spring picks the locks of the wind.
High in the night sky the mirror is hauled up and unsheeted. In it we twist like stars.

Ahead of us, through the dark, the dead
Are beating their drums and stirring the yellow leaves.

We're out here our feet in the soil, our heads craned up at the sky,
The stars streaming and bursting behind the trees.

At dawn, as the clouds gather, we watch
The mountain glide from the east on the valley floor,
coming together in starts and jumps.
Behind their curtain, the bears
Amble across the heavens, serene as black coffee...

Whose unction can intercede for the dead?
Whose tongue is toothless enough to speak their piece?

What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint,
Or messages to the clouds.
At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear.
Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,
Our gestures salve for the wind.

We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs,
Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.


Homage to Paul Cezanne
~by Charles Wright

what it is

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight.

And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can’t transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.

It seems that human beings everywhere understand that a child who is never allowed to play will eventually go mad. But how do we know this? And why do we know this? And what happens when we forget?

-Lynda Barry

Horses At Midnight Without A Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

-Jack Gilbert


(with love from the birdgirl)

a machiguenga charm

opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking at me

opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking at me

ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking hard at me

ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness is looking hard at me

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much

amakyena tampia tampia tampia
air, wind has brought me

ogaratinganaa tampia tampia
air has borne me away

okisabintsatana shinoshinokarintsa
sadness troubles me very much

okisabintsatana shinoshinokarintsa
sadness troubles me very much

amaanatyomba tampia tampia
air, wind has brought me

onkisabintsatenatyo shinonkashinoshinonkarintsi
sadness troubles me very much

amakyena popyenti pogyentima pogyenti
the little worm, the little worm has brought me

tampia tampia tampia
air, wind, air

-mario vargas llosa

chimaera

this morning she smells like the lake. like hours underwater, drying in the sun, asleep. she let me curve my belly against her back and huff the deep dust of her neck.

i followed the blood trail to my door.

lupines.

love. trust. magic. faith. hope.
five steps. breathe. look up, look down. repeat.
lovetrustmagicfaithhope.lovetrustmagicfaithhope.

root of toes, stripe of white. dark freckled shoulders. adult turkey vulture. a house with nine dogs. is easier than a house with one dog.

insomnia.

seven-headed dragon, small woodland creature, black hole.

her dream of weeping.

she longs with a deep nostalgia for her home country.

to say: i need you to trust i come to you with good intentions.
to say: it is no longer possible.

wisteria fingering gaps in structure.
honeysuckle. apple roses. lupines.

what happened a year ago, today. maybe you remember.

we are the sentient beings. knowing what is needed.

hunger. antibiotics. unsolicited medical advice. forgetting more questions need asking. the snap of over-tired women.

parallel paths, brief joinings. crossroads. goodbye, goodbye.

the first buoyancy of the season.

beyond the fence

Two flat tires on the Model T

Two birds fighting for a worm

Faded squares like snowy TV screens

Where your photographs were hung

Keep Old Glory folded on a shelf

In a cabinet full of guns

Sell that engine block to someone else

Maybe they can make it run

How'd that calf get out beyond the fence?

How'd that hole get in your jeans?

Movie show was once but twenty cents

That mud there was once a stream

The moon is high, your nose is burnt

Your dog is gone

Your mouth is dry, the milk is turned

But Barbara's home

Hand in hand you watch the sun go down

Colored lullabye of God

Barbara wears her mother's old nightgown

Sleeping with a nightlight on

White sheet blowing on a short clothesline

New tree bending to the breeze

This clock's beautiful but can't keep time

What's that scar on both your knees?

The moon is high, your nose is burned

Your dog is gone

Your mouth is dry, the milk has turned

But Barbara's home

. iron & wine