To put straight the long-lingering sunshine

An original auto-translation by Fiona Martinez

To put straight the long lingering sunshine

the wind when I doghead out the window,
the doors gasping still, the wound of the photos,
each thrash of film,                           my cartilage
rattling             all become the same heartbeat of a song

the world feels less and less like home
while I’m less lonely than ever

he gazes on til moonlight
I, on the ceiling, find “mi cielo” has no limit,
              but use it sparingly anyway

even as we listened to our song, driving away from
a dizzy summer high, blue sky and insect strung field
it was disappeared– like anything caught/too close,
                                                                    seasons close heavy eyelids like the
                                                                                  shutter click of cameras
never such honey down my throat
we take this night by night 

I want only to keep                 salty ocean                                                  if I opened up
                          sticky on my skin                                                                my body, I’m
                                                                                                                          certain you 
                                                                                                                          would weep
              remembering more than the road

and while the world around us slows
      honey, 
      dripping hot down my throat
and if my body became one open throat, one open mouth,
I’m certain you would weep to see inside

Fiona Martinez is a poet and community organizer from Boise, Idaho. She is a current student in the MFA writing program at UC San Diego. She explores free verse and hybrid work including bilingual writing and visual poetry/autobiography. Fiona believes in creativity as an act of resistance, using writing as a tool of activism while organizing in communities towards local and global social justice. Her writing centers nature, water, home (as place and embodiment), and the persistent entanglement of violence and tenderness. Most at home in nature, Fiona writes while walking, ocean wading, watching the branches for birds, and the cracks in the sidewalk for the unexpected.

Artist’s Statement This is the act of translation visualized on the page, with the poet and technology as co-translators. The piece moves from its original form as a handwritten poem to a transcription by a phone camera. From this version, all words in other languages were translated through Google Translate. Remaining words that existed in no language obvious to the internet I translated myself by adapting the words to create new meaning. The final translation was reached through omission, further obscuring or refining the poem. The computer clutter left on the page portrays erasure and lack of clarity in this translation, where the translators disagree on language. The title collides possible meanings of the word “oretia” also represented in visuals of trees taken by me and reproductions by OpenArt AI.

This piece was a practice in co-creating with technology. It could not exist without technology, but I also resisted some of the forms it tried to take, ultimately taking autonomy over blurry transitions or those with dead ends. The poem and visuals center embodiment and nature, while the translation creates a speculative world in which technology tries to rewrite and fill in the blanks, but struggles to assign emotion or “sense.”