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Home | Magazine | January 2018 | Poetry


Martín Gambarotta
Alexis Almeida Vacations in the ice, the London Manifesto
transformed into a heap of stupidities
an ultimatum for the scum, the day moon.

Inertia: from the
clean shore
to the dirty shore.

What every young person should hate: Dylan
the truncated Iliad, meat on the trident harpoon

What every young person should hate: MacLeish
A Cuba Libre cocktail with ice, the in-
divisible self.

What every young person should hate: early
onset dementia, the monopoly of beer, sand
in the bed. /

on the beach;
sand must seem
like snow to them.


To listen to music
all day, all day
I want it and to work at night
an easy job I ask for
taking care of plants
in a nursery (on the
other side of the track)
sit in a glass house
and extract from your head
the hum
of dignity


To have two names and not know
which comes before the other. To
have called the sea black milk. When
you wake up suddenly there are
times when you don’t know who you
are, where you are, what language
you speak, what social class you are
part of, and you question yourself about that
in rapid succession
clinging to the edge of the bed. Until
your head reassembles its parts and
answers: you are Arnaut, you’re in
Buenos Aires, you don’t speak any
language, I can’t find a definition for
the people of your social class.

Translations from the Spanish
By Alexis Almeida Martín Gambarotta has published three books of poetry: Punctum (1996), Seudo (2000, republished as an expanded version Seudo/Dubitación in 2014), and Relapso+Angola (2005). Between 1996 and 2006 he was editor of poesia.com, a website dedicated to contemporary Latin American poetry. For many years he was news editor and political columnist with the Buenos Aires Herald. Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. Her recent translations include Florencia Castellano’s Monitored Properties (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Roberta Iannamico’s Wreckage (Toad Press). She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches writing.
 



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