Lucía Estrada
trans. by Olivia Lott
THREE POEMS
Quotidian
A bitter smirk comes loose from my mouth, rolls down the street, vanishes. Somewhere, somebody cultivates mirrors to erase everything. Its purpose echoes in every air syllable.
Living is a strange condition of death. I carry it with me, but its phantom moon is weightless on my body.
A name is diluted in every reflected face. I beg for mine to stay cryptic.
Mare Nostrum
They cross a stretch of salt, a liquid desert, a word everyone knows. They cross their own fear of loss, of not finding what they’re after, of not knowing what was once theirs and now roams dislodged beneath the sea. In the depths, less and less fathomable. Far away, near the quiver that burns in eyes; it condemns looks.
Not a single footprint to follow. The trace of a bleeding animal has been stripped away by wind. Doubts have been thickened by waves. Nobody will gather pleas, ravaged hands, red sunset sky that won’t come back the same.
Swayed by memory, their eyelids ban night. It’s all sun and biting silence, barely a whisper of what life was.
Nothing before them. They gave up earth and earth wouldn’t lay claim to them.
Hundreds of eyes sink their riches, childhood’s lukewarm light lowers between the cracks of ships. Water has lost sight of its search and soon will untie the knots of its heart. Each teardrop dangles a day’s trajectory. Minutes no longer count, just the thirst for dropping anchor at an unknown, forgiving port. Thirst for swallowing visions, thirst for unthinking.
A mass of bodies with nothing but flight handed down to them. Who will tell them this sea belongs to nobody, that it leads to nowhere, blind to hours and unsettled time, it never retraces its steps?
Offering
Your body puts up a fight for a moment, your eyes have gotten used to the shadow. A rope around your neck, glowing weight on your back. Then it’s not worth it to put up your truth against a violence that sinks you effortlessly, finishes you off at the gates of you. You’re shaking.
Air has stripped its branches. You’re a small creature between the tiger’s teeth, and your blood traces damp, half-done silhouettes that know nothing about light. Inside, every fiber will burn until reduced to ash. You’re shaking, sacrificial stone snatched from night. Everything in you bites, shrinks. Inside and out, like a flare-up right on your face.
You give in. Day will slice up your body. After all, you’re part of the offering.
Lucía Estrada (Medellín, 1980) is the author of ten books of poetry. She is the two-time winner of the Bogotá Poetry Prize, most recently in 2017 for her latest collection Katábasis (2018), which was also named a finalist for the Colombian National Poetry Prize. Estrada is currently the cultural coordinator at the Corporación Otraparte in Medellín. The first full-length English-language translation of her poetry, Katábasis, is forthcoming in October 2020 from Eulalia Books.
Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada's Katábasis, which is forthcoming from Eulalia Books in October 2020, and co-translator of Soleida Ríos's The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions). She is the curator of Poesía en acción on Action Books' blog. Lott is ABD in Hispanic studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing a dissertation on translation, revolution, and 1960s neo-avant-garde poetics in Latin America. Twitter: @oliviamlott