Pretending That The Pain She Feels Is Pain Poem by Yolanda Castaño

My looks suggest I like
things that I do not.

Everyone speaks through
closed lips.

As does this.
The walls of a grotto where, ten thousand years ago,
someone sullies the natural essence of the stone.
Coins, alternating current,
a girl born with beauty in her genes,
pock-marked by hang-ups.
Like an orgasm in Hedy Lamarr, like Nikola Tesla's eyes.
A country where one needn't be,
but can merely
appear to.
A peeling away of gloves,
a touch of spice, the most prestigious
of all dubbing schools.

Capital is the nightmare
of being caught in our symbolic capacity.
The most flattering of all: mortuary makeup.
Years of work turned into equestrian granite.
An industry of poverty, wolfram in kitchen gardens.
Like an ardent body, aware but
feigning innocence.
Cheap false eyelashes, an image
identical to itself.

Like political poetry confused
with a selfie in the bathroom mirror.
The metonymy of evil.
The normative wrenched.
A set stage, a menu, an emergency escape from the fires of discourse.
Something whose roots stretch out to the air and longs
to return to the soil, once time
has elapsed since it burst into light-
like the eyes in potatoes.

The poem's gaze is like this too:
worker ants in single file,
flattened forever
in timeless lines,

shreds of gestures
that look like
something else.

Translation by Carys Evans-Corrales