Raúl Gómez Jattin
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen & Olivia Lott
I'm a god in my town and my valley
It's not because they worship meBut because I do
Because I bow down before anyone who offers up
some passion fruits or a smile from their own garden
Or because I head down to the bad side of town
to beg for money or a shirt and I get it
Because I keep a close watch on the sky with my sparrowhawk eyes
and then talk about it in my poemsBecause I'm lonesome
Because I slept for seven months in a rocking chair
and another five on some city sidewalk
Because I give wealth the side eye
but I'm not mean about itBecause I love anybody who loves
Because I know how to grow orange trees and vegetables
even in the dog days of summerBecause I have a compadre
whose children I baptized and whose marriage I blessed
Because I'm not good in a way people get
Because when I was a lawyer I didn't defend capital
Because I love birds and rain and its wide-open
washing my soulBecause I was born in May
Because I know how to sucker punch my sticky-fingered friend
Because my mother left me right when
I needed her mostBecause if I'm sick
I go to the free clinicBecause basically
I only respect those who respect meThe ones who work
every day for their bread bitter and lonely and wrangled
like these poems of mine I've stolen from death
from the book ALMOST OBSCENE / Cleveland State University Poetry Center
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"Almost Obscene" is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.
 
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Join Poetry Daily Editorial Board member, Dana Levin, and Poetry Daily's Co-Editorial Director, Peter Streckfus, for an evening of conversation and poetry.
 
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Four Scholars on "The Waste Land" at 100

"Newly resonant in our moment are the poem’s desertified, rocky landscape, its unburied corpses, its polluted air, its 'dry sterile thunder without rain,' its rivers sunken or sweating oil and tar or strewn with garbage, its accusation of the culpable reader, its diffused sense of catastrophe on a global scale, and its refusal to pretend that the losses it mourns can be redeemed."

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Cindy Juyoung Ok on Kim Hyesoon's "After All the Birds Have Gone"

"Stanzas and whole poems refuse the unit of the sentence, creating new syntax and refusing to designate themselves relevant to the constructs of past, present, or future. Kim’s is a poetry of present aftermath—of the annihilation absolute but not completed, of the past yet also ongoing. Although the source text of 'After All the Birds Have Gone' is in the present tense, its frame of reference is of survival, invoking the past, while the implied conditional hints at the future." 
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