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

Ramiro Sanchiz
Translated by Audrey Hall

On the outskirts of Punta de Piedra, there is a bar a good distance beyond the last line of houses. From the untidy plain arises what is essentially a cube of gray concrete with small windows and a parking lot. Actually, to simulate the impression it always made on me when I looked at it—with the houses of Punta de Piedra in the distance and the plain stripped down to what the universe must have looked like hundreds of millions of years ago—I would have to resort to a simple, coarse, improbable image: an art nouveau building on some remote, uninhabited planet.

My grandfather used to go round there on Friday nights, but I wasn’t allowed to go with him. So one day in February 1990, my friend Marcos and I hopped on our bikes … Read More »

Juan Carlos Mondragón
translated by Leah Leone

Until the middle of the afternoon of the day before yesterday, I thought I had a good angle for the article I was writing about an incident in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, as a way to further the discussion about the submarine strategy employed during the blockade of Port Arthur. While researching, I also worked on my courses for the upcoming semester—I teach Latin American History at an Italian university and lead a seminar based on Eugen Millington Drake’s Battle of the River Plate—to bring focus on the key elements that had contributed to the stunning efficacy of a joint strike at high seas, the incalculable factor that had made it a classic battle in all of military history, without arriving at a convincing conclusion. When the logical connection has rusted over, … Read More »