Andrea Durlacher
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.
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