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Issue 31
Poetry

Poems from Ejercicios respiratorios

  • by Fermín Vilela
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  • September, 2024

 

Poems from Ejercicios respiratorios

 

Craft

For Zsazsa Karl

The messenger paints solid brushstrokes
then cleans the tools with her saliva.
We like to watch her sketch landscapes
similar to her own,
lights submerged in shallows
of medicines and distant songs.

Inside it rains in a different language.
She sketches the translation in her notebook
then returns to work.

The messenger walks on tiptoe
from reef to reef, lest
she wake her frightful creatures.
Afterward she returns to her paint,
two or three whales under her arm.
And smiles at me. 

 

Poems from Ejercicios respiratorios

 

Phanopoeia

If in my chest flutters
a thrush perched on a wire
it will automatically waken
the morose cicada
of the poem.

To trap a few ideas
in an attempt at describing
a sound memory. To slow it down
until my hand holds,
very carefully,
the bird of silence
and frees it of language
and substance.

 

Poems from Ejercicios respiratorios

 

Lists

You feed the ghost,
pray without knowing a line,
spit light to see how our waists
open to the design of another sea
and affection lies wounded,
agonizing on a beach.

Other voices
say more precisely
what we wish we had—
the moment so sensitive,
pivotal and spectral. 

It was just a question of learning
to listen to them—don’t you see them?
The voices are there, they’re coming.
Maybe it doesn’t matter much,
your face fades on its own,
and affection is still agonizing
on the beach.

 

Poems from Ejercicios respiratorios

 

Fish

You moved underwater
among the diamonds and crowns
of buried bottles.
I want to say that I tried to call you,
or at least find you, who knows where,
in the street, by chance,
like trying to fish in the river
with two grams of bait and a kilo
of one-eyed jasmines stuffed in my mouth.

It wants to bite. Churns up water. Tugs on the line.
But the rod goes still again.

The water flows, it flows and undoes
these little dramas, this inclination
of dogs towards the river,
lest one of them remain, eternally
waiting, with horizontal
persistence and the illusion
of a straight line. 

Translated by Sarah Moses

 

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Images from Ejercicios respiratorios by Fermín Vilela.
  • Fermín Vilela

Fermín Vilela was born in 1992 in Buenos Aires. An autodidact, he studied drawing and painting with Oscar Smoje while attending the literary workshops of Claudia Masin, Eduardo Mileo, and Abelardo Castillo. He is the author of the poetry books Dormitorio (2017), Purga (2019), and Janeiro (2021). He has twice been awarded a Beca Creación from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, with which he has undertaken arts residencies in Italy, Brazil, and Portugual. In 2023, he gave his first individual exhibition of drawings and paintings at Espacio Moebius in Buenos Aires.

  • Sarah Moses
photosarahmoses1

Sarah Moses is a Canadian writer and literary translator from Spanish and French. Her translations include Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh and Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (Pushkin Press/Scribner, 2020 and 2023) and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz (Charco Press, 2017), which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the Best Translated Book Award. With Tomás Downey, she co-translated Sos una sola persona (Socios Fundadores, 2020), a selection of poems by Stuart Ross. Forthcoming publications include a co-translation of Julio Cortázar’s letters with Anne McLean (Archipelago Books) and The Place Where Birds Die, stories by Tomás Downey (Invisible Publishing). Sarah has written one chapbook of fictions in Spanish, as they say (Socios Fundadores, 2016), and one in English, Those Problems (Proper Tales Press, 2016). Strange Water, her first full-length collection, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions/1366 Books in the fall. She lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from.

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