Contributions by John Oliver Simon
John Oliver Simon is a distinguished translator who has brought Gonzalo Rojas, Elsa Cross, Alberto Blanco, Jorge Fernández Granados, Eduardo Milán, Paulina Vinderman and Alicia Salinas, among others, from Spanish into English. He is Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out, a program that teaches kids to write poetry via literary translation. One of his poems is engraved in bronze on the sidewalk in the Poetry Walk of his hometown of Berkeley. He edits the on-line journal Aldebaran Review. He is the grandfather of Tesla Rose Simon Moyer, born in 2008.
Ariel Schettini
translated by John Oliver Simon
SHADE SAILS
Not poppy, nor mandragora,
nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owed’st yesterday
Othello III.iii
When night falls I’m another woman.
Because day is something else and falls into night.
Day and night. Given and withheld.
But I might have said: when day falls,
Worn out from being day all day long,
Night comes and transforms day
Into a bitch, a beast, a ferocious rising
And day’s no longer day, it’s night.
We call that process half-shadow.
Plants no longer release oxygen and begin to emit CO2
the half-shadow attacks
like a beast in a cape, under shade sails.
I’m a chicken spider, a tarantula making webs from darkness.
Weaving all day night’s inevitability.
I stop breathing — at twilight nobody breathes — like a spider.
Give her what she wants, and there, seduced, she stops breathing.
Nervous system … Read More »
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