Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry awards
My friends with who I talked night after night about
the fate of the world
and among the small interruptions of our talks was
what we left behind for the others, impossible to
survive and so familiar
that you may pass by it without noticing.
Years passed this way. The sick waited for the opening
of the old carpentry
I preferred to go up to the attic; the blind man with the
threads stayed there
while the other tenants lived downstairs imagining that
they truly lived;
“You may lay me”, the ugly woman said “but place a napkin
on my face”
dark, impenetrable, moist from top to bottom like a
great meaning and when
Chryssostomos smelled because of the gangrene
she stood at the door and scare away the dogs; one
night, in fact, but what can you call them “thieves”
I yelled,
people passed by, cried, or made bets since there was
always a black horse where you couldn’t see anything
and alcohol has its stony wing too.
Ah, those were the long days when the people ran
in the streets;
the uprising threw a ladder like a prayer over the city;
the days were like a populace of candles scattered
on the asphalt and we who survived all this had
nothing left but matches only for our cigarettes.
I remember that poor man at the corner; he held
a cuspidor over his face
so he could pass as guileless and the sleepwalkers
step at the edge of the roof and don’t fall since
someone else keeps the count like trustworthy
birds that
will kill us easier.
Libros Libertad 