I have a fever and its name is God. The nurses come in shifts and worship it.
All around me the land suffers from the loss of love’s handkerchief. Children sing brackish rhymes in the lowest schools.
There is no key, only the locked door projected onto the city wall. In my dreams I run from it.
The nurses bandage my body in mathematical problems I can’t solve. I tell them no, no, measure me by the sweetness of honey—
Hush, they whisper. Our names, too, are written in the Book of the Smallest Moon. You were brought here in the traitors’ black ambulance. Your brother is a scar.
The nurses place bowls of fruit around my prone body, as sacrifices. Not to you, they explain, but to the heat you bear.
Finally I stumble through the image of the door in broad daylight. No one stops me. I am prescient as a lilac.
But the nurses say We will never leave you. They have prepared a feast, they have sewn my wedding garment. There are so many of them, far too many to count. Each of them lifts a piece of me to her mouth—
By the sweetness of honey. Let me and my works be undone.
"Linguistic experimentation and political rebellion went hand in hand in the work of the Ecuadorian Adoum, a leading figure of the Latin American neo-avant-garde who wrote his verses in what he called 'postspanish.'"
"To translate Šimić into English requires constant pruning, knocking phrases down to their lowest common denominator. My goal was faithfulness to the original while maintaining the spare intensity of Šimić’s lines, and our conversations often grew heated. I came to crave the moment my father snapped his fingers to demonstrate that I had unlocked the mystery in English."
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