Translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada
When it comes to decapitations I just have to say one thing:
it’s tough to learn to perfect a smile for the executioner.
The executioner’s nobility, like a beauty pageant, has been
forged by long tradition.

Also present is the public, they haven’t paid admission,
they’ve endorsed justice without understanding it. They
listen to the leader’s voice without any sign of approval
whatsoever, just waiting to find out what a body with
no head is like.

But the show lasts only seconds. They know this: think
about second chances, about past lives, parallel worlds,
the beyond, and meanwhile, all the great ideologies can fit
into a refrigerator.

That’s why a poem isn’t a poem if it doesn’t know how to
suspend death. That’s why the axe never makes it to the
neck, but it’s there, at the point of dismembering it.



Títulos nobiliarios
Sobre las decapitaciones solo tengo que decir una cosa: es difícil
aprender a tener la sonrisa perfecta para el verdugo. La nobleza del
verdugo que toda la tradición forja como un certamen de belleza.

También está el público que no ha pagado entrada, que se ha
sumado a la justicia sin comprenderla. Escucha la voz del líder sin
gestos aprobatorios, sólo esperando saber cómo es un cuerpo sin
cabeza.

Pero el show dura segundos. Lo saben: piensa en la  segunda
oportunidad, en las vidas pasadas, en los mundos paralelos en el
más allá, mientras las grandes ideologías caben una refrigeradora.

Por eso un poema no es un poema si no sabe congelar la muerte.
Por eso el hacha nunca llega a su cuello, pero está ahí, a punto de
desmembrarlo.
from the journal GULF COAST
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Detail of the eyes from an early photograph of Elizabeth Bishop

"'Late Air' reveals the poet musing on the nature of love as she sits on a Key West veranda late on a humid summer night, hearing the intermingled strains of recorded music wafting toward her from the wireless sets playing loudly through the open windows of her neighbors’ houses, as if 'from a magician’s midnight sleeve,' so that the singers on the radio sets surrounding her 'distribute all their love-songs / over the dew-wet lawns.'"

via LIT HUB
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Cover of Aracelis Girmay's book, Teeth
What Sparks Poetry:
Cynthia Dewi Oka
on Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica”


"I first encountered this poem in my early twenties, when I had just started to consciously write poems. It was a very difficult time in my life—I was a young mother juggling several precarious jobs and still grieving the loss of my father and separation from my community as a result of my decision to raise my child on my own. I was living like a ghost."
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