Excuse me, is this the smoke shop?
No one says everything. No one says anything.
It’s best to say very little.
Shutting up isn’t more extreme.
Shutting up is like shaving your head:
your hair grows back.
But saying very little, saying the least
that one can say,
that’s what allows us to say something.
Amaru Ranka
Historians are in agreement that the Incas were hostile to homosexuality but in
other places it might have been considered a ritual act.
María Rostworowski,
Estructuras andinas del poder
Only three facts are known about Amaru Ranka.
That he lived during the eleventh century.
That he practiced the exchange of like for like.
That he threw himself into the Wakpi-wakpi River.
It is also said that the following poem belongs to him:
my words are a knife
chilling when it enters your heart
laughing when it enters mine.
Magnifichant
After work, remunerated, immune, practically
municipal work, taking care that my child
doesn’t fall, and making love nocturnal,
I blot out the megawatts
and drink til I’m plastered
(moonshine, muni, nearly connubial)
later, through the spines of the shutters I can see
dawn orange as a ripe papaya
falls from the sky
and shatters on the pavement.
Borders
Peru borders a forgotten language to the east.
Peru borders a 350,000-ton Japanese freighter to the west.
Peru borders Chimbote, whose ports it never managed to
manage, to the north.
Peru borders precipitously to the south.
Goal and Object of a Poem
It’s nighttime and you have to land
before the fuel runs out.
That’s how all your poems end,
trying to express a private sentiment
with public language.
Your aspiration is a pilot’s speech
talking to passengers
during a desperate situation:
part trick, part hope, part truth.
All your poems end the same way.
Smashed to bits against a dark hillside
that wasn’t in the charts.
Later they find the wreckage: the fuselage
the tail intact, as always,
the smell of something scorched consumed by fire.
But not a word survives.
Eight Quatrains Denouncing the Peruvian Paso [14 lines]
I hurl a word what my lips say describes an ellipse
what my lips say describes an ellipse I throw what lips say draw away draw away from
me describes an ellipse
what my lips say describes an ellipse does not describe an object at the end of the ellipse
at the end of an ellipse there can be there cannot be an object at the end of the ellipsis
there can be nothing but there cannot not be an ellipse
the only thing there is is the ellipse that describes what lips say when hurled away from
you
I hurl a word what my lips say draws away from me describes an ellipse
I hurl a word what my lips say draws away from me describes an ellipse
I hurl a word what my lips say draws away from me describes an ellipse
I hurl a word what my lips say draws away from me describes an ellipse
what my lips say doesn’t describe an object that is or is not at the end of the ellipse it only
describes an ellipse
at the end of the ellipse there is a horse
what my lips say falls upon the horse breaks him in two three the horse collapses breaks
in two three obliterates it
there may be a horse there may not be a horse at the end of the ellipse there is no horse.
describe an ellipse
Translated by Clare Sullivan
“Excuse me, is this the smoke shop?”, “Amaru Ranka,” “Magnifichant,” “Borders,” and “Goal and Object of a Poem”: From Language Is a Revolver for Two. © Mario Montalbetti. Translation © Clare Sullivan. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018.
“Eight Quatrains Denouncing the Peruvian Paso [14 lines]”: From Asymmetries: Anthology of Peruvian Poetry. Ed. Paul Guillén, Giancarlo Huapaya, Cristian Medina, and Maggie Messerschmidt. Cardboard House Press, 2014.
