Andrea Cote-Botero
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott
At a quarter past four
surrounded by Chinatown merchants
I tell him:
I outlasted the earthquake and water.
I'm 1989 splitting in two
and what you're thinking right now,
I'm that too.
I'm a sweet girl
–I'm china–
like that woman you think
would look better if she kept quiet
and messed up her hair
and was somewhere else
but not here,
who'd look great naked
and stretched out
in a Modigliani painting.
I'm her,
and of course
sir,
it's true
I'm Modigliani.

I'm the star tip
and the paper strip that falls through the air on holidays,
the author of the theory
that the spirit
is a bone that can't be gnawed away at.

I'm the urge to fall apart and say something.
I can't afford a ticket to the movies,
but I'm in all of them
and that's why I'm dirty
and worn out
and a sadder man than god.

By this time I'm cardboard
and dough,
the paper mat
and the purple street corner
and what you left behind at the station.

I'm a foot in the stirrup
and the last thing that Paul thought
and I can say anything because I'm dirty
and I can't afford my own ticket to the movies.

I'm the author of the theory of the spirit,
I'm one side of the spirit,
I'm the ideal girl.
I'm Chinatown,
sir,
for real,
24/7
and overrun,
I have a street on every corner in the world
and, naturally,
I'm
the only thing we've got left.
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THE UNFINISHED STORY OF A FIRST FOLIO
 

Michael Caines traces the history of a copy of Shakespeare’s Folio, cleaned, repaired and soon to be on display.

via TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
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"He probably introduced the poems with something about unusual words and whether we knew what juniper and pied meant. But I wasn’t listening. I was reading: “One must have a mind of winter… junipers shagged with ice … rough in the distant glitter,” and wondering what it felt like to be cold so long that your mind turned wintery and you felt like a snowman. I was repeating silently to myself over and over that mysterious, solemn, slow last line. “The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Nothing and nothing at the far-end of a long sentence and an un-foot-printed walk through the snow."

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