the marvels rest
and the moon moves the windows
i kiss your hair as if kissing the world’s mouth
but the viscous voice of winter
asks me not to persist like the ant i am
asks me to stop dreaming
and with eyes blackened by sleep and rage
i still wish by your side
to burn the sky
to extricate one tear from the sea
***
[…] que todavia,
que todavia, se escuchen los gritos de nuestro amor
raúl zurita
when the day is over
i remember love as the glass of water spilled on a table
i feel the day oozing from my body
from the centre of life
when i lie down
i watch the night open over me
and think about love as god
screaming at us each day
birds make us grind our teeth
to tolerate everything
because for certain
it’s all too much
too much
***
at night i can the hear dust slide inside my head
fleeing through the organs
covering me
to calm the swing
of a body throbbing underneath
body of a son
i had to let go
old and bitter
a chair is growing inside me
look at the incomplete landscape
all the statements i’ve been
saved by dust
his death that grows
identical to the mother
***
i bite your elbows
i bite your knees
i slip through the looting of insomnia
a thunder of snow covers the animal of me
hidden in coordinates of yearning
where i lurk
***
the morning mist is my father
on his stretcher
waking up from the anesthestic
my father
a cloud with a needle
in its arm
***
faun
my old scar hurts
my neck still hurts from your hooves
and the endless ivory of heaven
and your forest grin
with its mosswounds
***
him
I
outside my house
the hoarse waters of early morning
parade through our lips
II
his eyes tiger through the kitchen
he explains the beheading of childhood
inside me
falling into the unborn excavation
of myself
III
the days rise like arrows of barborous light
he bites and is torn away
and when he exits
i don’t know how
split i am
which arrow i am
IV
for lou reed
we feed animals to live in the mind’s zoo
then we watch a movie
but really
all attention is drawn to the sudden inclination
we have to breathe underwater
together
V
we take the road he drives
his voice clear as a glass of water
i drink and the clouds stare at us
becoming salt
even the stones evaporate
and the sky is a demented pet
who loves us
***
dreamt of a pool of blood
and my sleeping body was a drawing in the background
a drawing that went out to bathe under a dislocated sun
a holy day to lie down beside you on the lounger
and say
—your love of death love has worked out well
sink your sweetened foot
afflicted by devotion
***
childhood
my dog transfigures into a corpse
i sleep with the anger of mud
chickens fall to the drain, flattened by my toys
a hundred sunsets laugh at me
trapped in the broken bone of a house
darkness running over my eyes
stagnated by a future, unarriving
***
Translated from Spanish by James Byrne
Sesgo. Ediciones Sin Nombre (Cuadernos de la Salamandra), 2015
Claudia Berrueto was born in 1978. She is a poet from Saltillo, in Coahuila, the north of Mexico. She is a fellow of the Foundation for Mexican Literature (2005-2006), and National Fund for Culture and Arts, (2009-2010/2011-2012). Her work has been included in the Anthology of Mexican Poetry: from the second half of the 20th century to the present (2014). Her collection, Polvo doméstico (Domestic Dust), won the national prize of poetry in Tijuana in 2009. Her latest collection, Sesgo (Bias), won the Iberoamerican Prize Fine Arts of the Poetry Carlos Pellicer in 2016, this book was reissued in Ecuador within the Alfabeto del Mundo Collection (La Castalia/Lineaimaginaria Ediciones) in 2021, and also in Chile (Cinosargo Ediciones) in 2022. Claudia is President of the Seminary of Mexican Culture in Arteaga, Coahuila. In 2018, she joined the National System of Art Creators. She is currently editorial coordinator of Dissemination and Cultural Heritage at the Autonomous University of Coahuila.
James Byrne is a british poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collections are Places You Leave (Arc Publications, 2021), The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ (Arc, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, US, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, UK, 2015). He was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012 he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012, Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) and he co-edited I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. He is the co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Byrne is currently Reader in Contemporary Literature at Edge Hill University.