Larva seguido de cerca

---

I.I.

i feed that which runs away

 

with these hands of
precise animal
i make tinder of my name
and wait for the seed

 

 

 

i climb from the mud

 

a pale creature that
breathes and plunges its eyes into light

 

wind      heat      blindness

what we knew of the body
before

 

 

 

like one who closes
his eyes or craves the
migration of birds
I renounce the landscape

 

saplings
smolder

 

and I suffer: a blind man

 

 

 

to open my hands
like weeping or
like flesh

 

that is my revolt

 

 

 

to wander was to see

the hungry quivering of
moths to collapse
at our centers
or to hold on

 

 

bruised
my blood
i hear its hum

 

 

 

Your voice comes to

and its ashes. You
I remember
vast fragile
while you point to the break.

 

What symbol will I use for your face?

 

---

By Pilar Fraile Amador
translated, from the Spanish, by Lizzie Davis

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Lizzie Davis is a poet and translator studying Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has appeared in several print and online journals, including Clerestory Journal, The Round, Bluestockings Magazine, and Aldus Journal of Translation.

Pilar Fraile Amador is an innovative Spanish poet who came of age post-Franco. Fraile writes disjunctive, multi-vocal poems that simultaneously enchant and disturb. This selection comes from Fraile’s book Larva seguido de cerca.