Translations of five poems by Julia Piera
by Forrest Gander
[ poetry - july 11 ]
Julia Piera (Madrid, 1970) has published the books Conversaciones con Mary Shelley (Icaria, 2006), Al vértice de la arena (Biblioteca Nueva, 2003) and Igual que esos pájaros disecados (Hojas de Zenobia, 2004). Her most recent poetry collection, Puerto Rico Digital (Bartleby, 2009), was a finalist for the Ausiás March Prize and for the National Critics Prize, 2010. The poems included here are part of Panic Cure: Ten Innovative Contemporary Poets from Spain, edited and translated by Forrest Gander.
She offers her resume through her bitch:
"doesn’t distinguish between love and
cocaine"
terminal hurricane pace
or corrosive urban animal
what pigeon to poison if they clone it with wind?
which rat’s tail to chop
if they squeal?, photocopied bacteria,
before cooking, the Chinese, their teeth?
*
And so it begins again,
lugging the politics of
fear on her shoulders
teeth sweating pure rage
a chest for the fencing of sobs
between garbage, screen,
cumulus succubus of garbage...
the terror with a cursor in its burned little
hand
screensavers, multiethnic
"personalized," just for her,
from a white balcony
of grates and pitas
the
b. skips,
digital gladiolus
and something immense
plunges
Returning quickly one morning, dawn,
discovering another
digital gladiolus, grown, its root in the computer.
Hybrid.
Reproving with each movement of its single leaf,
round bubble, inner
mirror of the display itself
opening toward her like an imax
fan,
making plans with planispheric
fingers
this patchwork island
its guts stitched to passports
the green worlds,
botanical giants in Utuado,
an urge for a food
word
typing
"reservation",
"Guinean", "banana plantation"
She smelled the life container
in the jars of cream
offerings of a disheveled body
she nibbled behind the ear
while thinking
"I believe there’s some language missing"
then she turned, all heat, swinging
her three hips,
her eyelids given over to the carousel of the room,
"here I’ll sleep well"
"this is an awful condition"
while rats trail us we’re looking for the source
of a source that has no source
she loses her passport
blue, ripe, she falls
to the bottom of an island
with the noise of her page body
belly button pierced swollen
from inserting ink and sand
mixed with sun
in her meat-hole
screwball.
"Smells
like iron,
screwball,
the page body.”
Island in a leukocyte corner
falling and rolling
"Screwball, yeah you..."
document’s coagulum
hanging there
