25 Mexican poets 30 and under

End of the Rope

{Widow number 8 sings}

1
He crawls like a tree branch, on the wet surface. Transpires one brimstone. Water crystals 
in the snout.

2
He is looking for food. Leftovers of smell which are rope, which are memory. The life of a 
town, in front of the candle and the portrait on the chest of drawers. 

3
The helmet hangs in the gnawed wardrobe. I cry, because I think of you trapped. Deafened.

4
600º C wave. Expansion. 2.5 kilometers. Asphyxia. You. Kneeled. You carry the shovel. The 
light bulb blinks. Black hands.

5
The hen broth and the beans await. Unburied. The table is in mourning. I bury the crossed 
knives so that the wind carries the rain away.

6
Saponified. Sunken. Useless. Lumps to order that should have been forgotten. 
Insomniac heat. 2:30 am.

7
Helicopter vultures. They sentenced the faceless children to death. Viscous event that didn't 
perechó2. 

8
In the middle of the night, I wake up, startled by your nightmares. Dreams I beg. Shreds.

9
Slitted tights, and all around, women thread a tableau of prayers. Blankets on guard. 10
Fenced by demolition. Area of risk. Miner 4, miner 2, second entrance, reported 
concentration. The pulleys remain dirty. 

11
Gray smoke, gray mortality. Gray cloudy rails. We remember them, when a country buried 
them without a corpse.

12
Generation after generation, the grandfathers harvested metals, while the unions soaped their 
skins with calabash.

13
Miners or soldiers of a war in sepia. Empty alcohol under their arms. From their canteens, 
they licked seconds.

14
Frozen busboys of the earth. Worth less than beasts. February 19, 2006. 6:00 am.

15
The air wouldn't be. Stop breathing. Survive. Epitaphs for the missing. Gante in his funeral. 
Wheat for the widows.

16
100 Orphans. And the anguish that silences nothing. Blue helmets. And they wonder, where 
are the widows? Three years later.

17
When a fire presses, again, against our breast, nothing quiets. For you, the live ones, the 65.

18
4:14 am. I get up just to boil water for you, only to return to your ciénaga3  arms.

19
But that dying dog dragging itself by the tail, but this silence, but these stained sheets scuff 
the scar.
 
20
And, at a sinister hour of dawn, I ask myself, when will you find my end? No more stones. 
Bones.

21
The Fates seal willow kisses, to raise them from the dead, wrapped in looks and white petals.

22
They pronounce their names, among Sabinas and stars, on St. John's Day: Javier Perez 
Aguilar, Amado Rosales Hernandez, Jesus Morales Boone, and 62 miners more.

23
The voice is the end of the rope.

---

² The author believes she heard this word in a song, some Italianized form of Argentinian Spanish, or maybe she made it up, but in her mind this word means something like grow, or mature.

³ Ciénaga means marshland, swamp or bog, words which don't have the sound of the original Spanish, so I decided to leave it.

Tumbling

The fierce bonza 1                                    attacks me with fangs of camphor.It takes away my hands.At dawnthe street tuneof a longed missed nymphomaniacraisesthe yearning of the pigeontremblingfor its children's song.Here I am, under the bunker with a disdain of fantasiesBrothel solitude. And through the tract, barbecued nausea. Under the bra, the temptation to biteof a guillotined St. Martin de Porresor a milkman fattening in the breasts of polyandry;the sweet flavors of the exploit,in the imagination of delay,in the waiting and rejectingof a lifetime.My womb makes itself comfortable.Undaunted and proud wants to give birth to the nausea.No,I said no.No to the edge of the cliffthe chronotope without hunger;head on to face the tradeof sex not love firstin the gut, let's gobefore preferring the burning,the restlessness of the sky we look at, from the yarns,tasting the subtle blizzardwhile pronouncing the gusts.We are the seeds of noor the success of all failures.-Don't cry, Angel Gonzalez-Come on, let's go, like slutty ones, to hell.Let's seize between the legswhatever needs to be held,with the eagerness,in the chordand its twenty one consonants.



1 bonza = the beast of self-immolation (t.n.)

* Traducción al inglés de Pilar R. Aranda, para bigbridge.org/