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Poetry

Three Poems

  • by Cindy Jiménez-Vera

A bucolic poem

The river dried up because it doesn’t rain.
The road that connects the countryside
to the city was turned to pieces
under the heavy showers
back when it did rain.
They closed the only grade school in town
on account of no more children,
say the elders of the land
shriveled as they are like when you enter a river
and stay in for too long a time.

Lucky Strike

While killing cockroaches in the bathroom of an apartment that will never be her own, she notices she’s menstruating. As she enters the shower, a drop of blood stains a lotto ticket on the floor by the wastepaper basket.

“The fact that it’s already at 24 million is a sure sign I’m not a winner.”

For now

In the same way
that credit card bills
come and go

that the noise of the collective
generator leaves us deaf
during blackouts

that the mortgage bank
threatens to take away
all private property
—this leaky roof—

the most public
of all properties
your smile
—which belongs to me
tax free—is enough
for now.

Translated by Guillermo Rebollo Gil
Photo: Street in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Beau Horyza, Unsplash.
  • Cindy Jiménez-Vera

Cindy Jiménez-Vera (San Sebastian del Pepino, 1978) is a poet, editor, and librarian from Puerto Rico. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections (all in Spanish), as well as a children’s book titled El gran cheeseburger y otros poemas con dientes. Her poetry has been featured in periodicals and anthologies in the Caribbean and Latin America. As an editor, she curated the small independent press Ediciones Aguadulce. A bilingual chapbook of her selected poems, translated by Guillermo Rebollo Gil, was published by Aguadulce in 2018, under the title I’ll Trade You This Island / Te cambio esta isla.

  • Guillermo Rebollo Gil
guillermorebollogilphoto1

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is the author of several poetry and essay collections, including Fire island (The New Heave Ho, 2014) and Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (Palgrave, 2018). As a translator, he has published I’ll trade you this island/Te cambio esta isla (Ediciones Aguadulce 2018), a bilingual selection of Cindy Jimenez Vera’s poetry, and Recetas naturales para el mundo fenomenal (Ediciones Aguadulce, 2017), a bilingual selection of Sommer Browning’s poems.

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