Three Poems from Nombres propios by Mercedes Alvarado

Three Poems from Nombres propios

by Mercedes Alvarado

Some things, while falling, make sound. Others do not. Night falls, for example, in silence. The house is unchanged. The furniture and the windows stay where they are. The spaces in between stay empty. Night stays in place, and the bags, the plates, the keys, the shoes stay wherever we leave them. The day’s debris does not move. But everything turns to darkness. Night has no sound of its own.

A body makes sound while falling onto another. Picks, sometimes, make sound while striking the earth. A voice makes sound calling out when the stick sinks all the way into the ground. Below is a pocket of gas that makes no sound. Hands stir the earth and the voices fall silent. Some clothes are found: all of this happens in silence. The bodies no longer make sound. Unearth is a verb of silence.

Death is a gerund. A shared waiting. A woman knows it’s coming and it hardly ever comes in silence. No. If I can’t manage to say anything, if I can’t manage to get it all over with quickly, if I have to see death for hours in the faces of anyone who gets on top of me, will I be able to ask—of death—that everything else be silenced?

At what point do we start crying out to death for mercy?

Night is impossible territory. Before we’d leave so something would happen to us; now when we leave it’s so nothing does.

Between me and that woman is the street. Who will run. Which way will we go. The rhythm of the march is constant: walking without the stench of rushing, glancing casually so as not to let fear show.

A woman wishes she could know the night’s silence will end if she arrives, complete, anywhere she goes.

Vocabulary Against Forgetting

for Samantha

I want you to learn the words
no
enough
disappeared
charred
raped
murdered

I want you to learn to say
such quotidian things
and still have
terror on your tongue

I want to spare you the horror
and I need to tell you
about these words, which hurt,
for which there is no peace, no way
to pronounce correctly
so that when reading them
you know that however quotidian,
possible, real, close,
they are
never
is there reason enough
to keep them to yourself.

Name a word.

Tell me
light

The sun is born in your eyes.
From your gaze, time darkens into dusk.

Tell me
song

Kilometers of music for your dream.

Tell me
earth

The wheat announces what’s already here
and you still haven’t even glanced it over.

Name the days
from the truth of who owns
the word
for the first time.

Tell me.

I will bring to the table those you haven’t named
so the water
not
—yet—
in your language
starts to flow.

If they tell you run
: learn to stay.
If they tell you to be silent
: learn to scream.
The word is deed
and the word is yours.

Poetry is found wherever there’s struggle.
Leopoldo Ayala

The nation I am
lives across all geographies
on the lips of people who use other languages
—second, third, fourth languages—
to name the place they’ve come from;

the nation that I am
that we are
son of corn
guard of its heritage
nation that walks and walks
nation carried on the back
nation that crosses the river
nation that takes the risk
nation that cries out
nation that knows to shut up
nation that does not know defeat;

the nation that I am
keeps looking
for all the children
siblings
parents
mothers
friends
colleagues
for all those
tossed into a shallow grave

for all those
found within a shallow grave

for all those who
though we don’t know when
will become
just one more person in some shallow grave or another;

the nation that I am
that we are
is the purposeful work of a smile
with its music
with its word games
with its good deeds
with its forgetting of the bad

the song that weeps
the promise that laughs
the heap of words
and the time upheaval of
this moment;

the nation I am
the one that goes out
again
again
again
to the streets
to say
I, upper-middle class
I, bourgeois
I, proletarian
I, immigrant
I, someone on their way back
I, someone who has left before
I,
I, a woman from Mexico
I:
I decide.

Translated by Whitney DeVos

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar living in Mexico City. She is translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard, both with Ugly Duckling Presse. Additional translations have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Full Stop, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, and The Acentos Review. She is an assistant poetry editor at Asymptote.

Photo: Shazaf Zafar, Unsplash.

Mercedes Alvarado

Mercedes Alvarado is the author of Días de luz larga (Elefanta, 2020) and Apuntes de algún tiempo (Verso Destierro, 2013). She produced Y hasta la muerte amar (2017), a collection of poetry with illustrations and two poetry-short films. Some of her poetry has been published in Mexico, the U.S., Spain, Portugal, and Norway. Her creative work has been performed at several venues in Norway, Sweden, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Whitney DeVos

Whitney DeVos is a writer, scholar, editor, and translator focused on the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard (Ugly Duckling, 2020), as well as co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling, forthcoming), Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común (Cardboard House Press, 2022), and the Spanish portions of A Year in the Sky (Triana Editorial, 2019). Her translations of Nahua poet Martín Tonalmeyotl have appeared in Asymptote, the World Literature Today blog, Latin American Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She has also translated writing by César Cañedo, Norah Lange, Hubert Matiúwàa, Valeria Meiller, A. E. Quintero, and Karen Villeda, among others. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Pitzer College and an NEA Translation Fellow. She divides her time between southern California and Mexico City.

Latin American Literature Today