Andrea Durlacher
Translated by Anna Rosenwong

It’s something no one regrets.

Menacing rituals arrive like an avalanche

and social norms.

Their arrival scares off any afternoon idle.

Shut the doors.

We’re cast down defeated in moonlight.

In turn

the reckoning.

*

I hope the moon

doesn’t draw us toward violent times.

I was never violent

and I won’t turn violent now.

As for you I love you moonless

in the sin of your own courage.

*

The letters of each syllable sink

in my room monsters surge back to life from a word.

Isolated birds

in scattered cages.

I remain.

I regard my thoughts.

Image: Eloisa Ballivian

Andrea Durlacher has been leading writing workshops since 2003 and has been a lecturer at the Universidad de Montevideo since 2006. She has worked as a columnist for El País, El Observador, and Montevideo’s Océano radio station. Her publications include a novel, Esto es una pipa, published by Penguin Random House in 2015, and a poetry collection, Ni un segundo para arrepentirme, which came out with Artefatto in 2004.

Anna Rosenwong is a translator, editor, poet, and educator. Her publications include Rocío Cerón’s Diorama (winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award), several chapbooks, and a collection of poetry by José Eugenio Sánchez (forthcoming from Autumn Hill Books). She is the translation editor of Anomaly. See more at annarosenwong.com.