Warren
poetry by Diego Alfaro Palma
translated by Lucian Mattison
All the orphans have arrived at this house: objects or
people, or is this the lyric of a nightstand’s song, real
like the vacuum agitating in matter, the leaves swept
by the storm, image of a Chevy in the patio’s rust,
as the children we never had play
hide and go seek without knowing why, and we ask that they raise
the volume on these things and, at once, pick them out of our pockets:
Love is no longer what lives between us, but it’s sorrow
which unites us.
Madriguera
Diego Alfaro Palma
A esta casa han llegado todos los huérfanos: objetos o
personas o es esto la letra de una canción de velador, real
como el vacío agitándose en la materia, las hojas barridas
por el temporal, la imagen de un chevy en el óxido del patio
mientras los niños que nunca tuvimos juegan a las
escondidas sin saber por qué y pedimos que suban el
volumen a estas cosas, sacarnos de una vez de los bolsillos:
El amor ya no es lo que habita entre medio, sino el dolor
que nos une a otros.
General Relativity
poetry by Diego Alfaro Palma
translated by Lucian Mattison
Beneath the curvature of light, time and space face one another
like an unseen child on a bridge. What he manages to see of
himself disappears in eddies created by trash.
The river carries his face toward the dominion of what could have or
should have been. The rest is a bottomless and empty plate, spinning,
its rim dirty, where light stops to sleep.
Relatividad General
Diego Alfaro Palma
Bajo la curvatura de la luz, el tiempo y el espacio se miran,
como un niño oculto en un puente. Lo que alcance a ver de
sí mismo desaparece en los remolinos que forma la basura.
El río se lleva su cara hacia al dominio de lo que pudo o
debió ser. El resto es un plato vacío y sin fondo, girando,
los bordes sucios, donde la luz se echa a dormir.
Lucian Mattison is an Argentinean American poet and author of “Peregrine Nation” (The Broadkill River Press, 2014) and “Reaper’s Milonga” (YesYes Books, 2017). He won the 2016 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize, and recent poems appear in The Boiler, Inter|rupture, and Pinwheel. His fiction appears in Fiddleblack, Nano Fiction, and Per Contra. He works at The George Washington University and is an associate editor for Big Lucks.
Diego Alfaro Palma (Limache, Chile, 1984) is a poet and editor. He is the author of two poetry books: “Paseantes” (2009, Ediciones del Temple) and “Tordo,” winner of the Santiago Literary Prize 2015 (Ediciones del Dock, Argentina, 2016 | Editorial Cuneta, Chile, 2014). He edited “Homage to Ezra Pound” (Universitaria, 2010) and the “Collected Poems of Cecilia Casanova” (Universidad de Valparaíso, 2013). His forthcoming work “Litoral Central” recently won publication in 2017 by the National Book Fund in his native Chile. He is the founder of publisher Limache250 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he currently resides.