Rosa Berbel
trans. by Jane Stringham
THREE POEMS
Resolutions
On New Year’s Day we lay down in the grass.
It wasn’t cold at all, and we would have liked
to smell of chlorine, pull up paving stones
revealing a long, sprawling August.
Eager, I led you by hand
like in those gorgeous photos from the future.
But the swimming pool was empty.
Then began the copious rain,
rain that dropped garlands
and smeared the scene with mud.
We weren’t in the habit of rain
or a love so dry
it left us running at all hours,
turning in circles.
We headed home when the rain let up.
The party had ended forever.
Don’t Look Now
The house has filled itself with ghosts.
Not everyone can see them.
Only you and me
speaking our impossible languages.
Emotion fabricates realities.
Some places only real to us
because they’ve been named so carefully.
Who do we thank
for a house of golden reflections,
for the calm of nightmares,
for giving us the extra keys?
Tonight we will not sleep alone
or live alone.
And the magic walks backward up the road.
Do we thank God, tenderness,
imagination?
The mystery barging in
rupturing what’s normal
and husking it
like a seed?
Witches’ FLight
The world was in darkness and we
witches had to name it.
Every kind of life was an offering.
Desire, the only catalyst
and we clung to it like clumsy animals,
women made from air or fire,
looking to conquer more words.
Do you remember a time when the world was a virgin
plain, ready for pleasure?
Remember pleasure and possibility?
Everyday things would often be summoned
by strange spells
in surprising languages
with terrible sounds.
To talk about death, we had to tear off our clothes
To talk about the future, we offered it our bodies
like fresh fruit opening itself on the branch.
To talk about love, we had to invent
another language.
The sacrifice to the word
was the most gorgeous sacrifice.
From its vigor came everything lovely,
the good and the useful,
the most savage
things that swarmed the earth like an oasis
in the middle of the desert.
But darkness didn’t last long.
Soon light hid its beauty.
Terrible words fly above the world
aware that unnamed perversions
live on.
Rosa Berbel (she/her) is a poet and doctoral candidate at the University of Granada. Her first book of poems, Las niñas siempre dicen la verdad (Hiperión, 2018), won the twenty-first Antonio Carvajal Youth Poetry Award. She also published Los planetas fantasma (Tusquets, 2022) and Brillantes y caóticas (Sonámbulos, 2020) and wrote the prologue for the recently reissued Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca (Planeta Publishing, 2022).
photo by Fátima RuedaJane Stringham (she/her) is a translator and fiction writer. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, as well as MAs in comparative literature and bilingual education. Her literary criticism has appeared in Plath Profiles and Utah Foreign Language Review. She is at work on her first novel in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains.
photo by John W. Landfair