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Issue 29
Poetry

Poems from My Icy Alphabet

  • by Camilo Fernández Cozman
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  • March, 2024

The edges of a cluster

Father and son,
summit abyss,
zenith versus nadir
a spike silence
glides into the spacious bedroom
someone sleeps impassively
Another one lies as a lookout,
kneeling
in front of empires of nothingness
one sketches the poem,
the other besieges a small face,
calibrates the fingers,
the impassive temples
stillness stirs
at the edges of a cluster,
the imperfect splits in two,
let’s subtract a fraction from the universe
son and father,
something hurts
this slight feeling of balance

 

Dinosaur

My eagle eye stops
at my son’s board game,
there are three soldiers shrouded in thicket,
one of them lying dead on the battlefield,
my son feels it hurriedly
and instills an unusual energy in him;
the warrior revives on the grass
while the light lacerates his silk eyelids
someone places a dinosaur, on the board game,
when the dawn is growing
away from my window;
my son romps with
this big-footed animal
and confused disposition;
I take it beside my shadow
and it rubs, with its small
but huge snout,
my fallen leaves.

 

Consonants

The first letter of your name
the diphthongs who dwell in your clothes
in your overtired arm
the hiatus like impossible boats
the sentence to which I arrive silent
deaf biting my long nails
when I touch
a spot on the horizon
and my arms become like leaves.

 

A chair

A chair facing another,
An old chair facing a table
whose edge has the smoothness of a stone;
the soul, that mill with no arms;
my body, that chair
ripped,
unstable
facing the horizon.

 

Rocky Landscape

A glass on an empty table,
A non-fragile glass on an empty table,
the table beside the bed where lays
the night,
The night intertwined with day,
the day though consumed running away from itself,
the itself out of the afternoon
the afternoon foreshadowing the sunrise,
the sunrise watching my monster orphanhood
and ants
under my ear.

Translated by Christian Arista
Photo: Surendran MP, Unsplash.

 

  • Camilo Fernández Cozman

Photo: Feria del Libro Ricardo Palma

Camilo Fernández Cozman (Lima, 1965) is a full member of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua and a corresponding member of the Real Academia Española. He has published the collections of poems Ritual del silencio (1995) and Mi alfabeto gélido (2022), as well as many essays, such as La poesía hispanoamericana y sus metáforas (2008). He works as a professor at the Universidad de Lima and the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

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