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Issue 4
October, 2017
Uncategorized

The Snack

  • by Andrea Cote-Botero

 

Also remember, María,
four in the afternoon
in our scorched port.
Our port
that was more a stranded bonfire
or a wasteland
or a lightning flash.
Remember the burning ground,
us girls scratching the earth’s back
as if to disinter the green meadow.
The lot where they were serving the snack,
our plate brimming with onions
salted by my mother,
fished by my father.
But despite all that,
you know well,
we would have liked to invite God
to preside at our table,
God but without a word
without miracles
and only so you would know,
María,
that God is everywhere
as well as in your plate of onions
although it makes you cry.

But above all
remember me and the wound,
before they grazed from my hands
in the wheatfield of onions
to make from our bread
the hunger of all our days
so that now
that you no longer remember
and the bad seed feeds the wheatfield of the missing
I discover you, María,
which is not your fault
nor the fault of your forgetting,
for this is the time
and this its task.

Translated by Andrea Cote-Botero

  • Andrea Cote-Botero

Photo: Margarita Mejía

Andrea Cote Botero is the author of three poetry collections, En las praderas del fin del mundo / In the Prairies of the End of the World (Valparaíso, 2019), La ruina que nombro / The Ruin that I Name (Visor, 2015), and Puerto calcinado / Port in Ashes (Universidad Externado, 2003; Valparaiso, 2010), and two collections of selected works, Chinatown a toda hora / Chinatown 24/7 (Valparaiso, 2015) and Desierto rumor / Desert murmur (El angel editor, 2016). She has also published two books of prose: A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti (Panamericana, 2005) and Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude (Universidad de Los Andes, 2004). In 2019, she curated and wrote a critical study for the Colombian women poets' anthology Pájaros de sombra (Vaso Roto, 2019), winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Poetry Collection (2020). Cote Botero has received the National Poetry Prize from the Universidad Externado of Colombia (2003), the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize (2005), an honorable mention for A las cosas que odié in the Ruben Darío International Poetry Contest, and the Cittá de Castrovillari Prize (2010), among other honors.  Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, and she has translated the poets Kahlil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith, and Jericho Brown into Spanish. She is a professor of creative writing at the bilingual MFA at UTEP.

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