Yolanda Castaño Poems

I,
who traced by car the banks of the Neretva,
who exhausted on bicycle the steaming streets of Cophehnague.
I who measured with my own arms the holes of Sarajevo,
who crossed, in the driver's seat, the border of Slovenia
...

We are making a detailed inventory,
like the herbarium of an unforeseeable constellation.
First are the lilies, adornment of splattered stars;
...

The entire sky is squatting. An intransitive thirst.

To speak in a foreign tongue
is like dressing in borrowed clothing.
...

The world is a hotel with no reception desk.
The gift of eloquence is not a common good.

Loaves and fishes were not distributed that way.
Meat to the starboard, fishbones to the port.
...

I shall begin with its density. Its acidity, its ph.

It walks just like a woman:
between the massacre of the invisible
and the concentration camp of visibility.
...

That nostalgia, the violets,
a rubric so alien to our languages,
being on a trip, Armenia, foreign signs,
the fleshy layer that covers my sensation.
...