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Issue 39
Poetry

“Meography” and other poems

  • by Jeannette Miller
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  • September, 2026

Meography

I
needing roots, lights
words of tenderness
sitting to ponder my misfortunes in the dead of the afternoon
medium masochist
foul
educator
I
preening on words alone
perceiving
projecting
interposing ideas into flesh
elevating vast walls of frigid metal, devourer
amongst others and
I
fearing the mind’s deterioration, wine, surrender
I seize my recollections
a girl: fat, worthless, abandoned
doll houses and quaint cups of tea
gusts of air and of sighs
between my grandpa non grandpa and without my father
I
finding in Franklyn, Juan Francisco and others
that terribleness I did not have
knowing to arrange letters, syllables, and names
carefully, aggressively
I
am fed up with me.

 


Monday
 

Every morning
as I get out of bed
I initiate my campaign toward death.
Before rupturing the day with my mask of accordance
I mourn a little.
Then
I proceed to execute my regimen in a daze,
the donning of my clothes,
the combing,
the breakfasting,
I leave.
I skirt dilapidated corners dappled with infinite particles of light,
the wind beats at my face,
a penetrating odor of putrefaction delivers me to misfortune.
In the gutters
overturned garbage cans
outline melancholy curvatures,
until even my homeland’s wellsprings turn murky, abhorrent,
without noticing
I penetrate the palpitating belly of a random automobile
and I feel heroine,
then I go on to recount the trees already cemented in my memory
whose leaves subdue the hard pavement with their shapes and colors,
a dull thud alerts me to my arrival,
I push the door,
I am in,
I smile trying to be agreeable, inoffensive,
so that they won’t fear me,
so that they won’t recognize my hate, my apathy, my sorrow,
the labor commences.

 

Pollution 

My dear friend,
tomorrow you will be bottled up
reduced to life-giving dust,
to meat concentrate.
The old assets of caskets and sobbing will remain.
The columns of clouds and the gestating tree
will not be yours.
As the wheel keeps spinning, your eyes begin to close,
losing humidity and movement.
Now having acclimated yourself to that light of corpses,
the rains of May will leave you irritated
and you will die,
without noticing,
licked by silt and soot,
suffocated by your own insipid saliva.

 

Translated by Ella Erdahl

 

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!

 

Photo: Dominican poet Jeannette Miller.
  • Jeannette Miller

Jeannette Miller (1944) is a Dominican poet, art critic, and scholar. She is considered one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of the Dominican Republic. She has earned many accolades throughout her career, including the 2011 Dominican National Prize for Literature. She was a founding member of “Generación de los 60,” a poetic movement that dealt with social and political themes following the death of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. These same themes continued to be present in later works that also reckoned with all facets of identity, both personal and political.

  • Ella Erdahl

Ella Erdahl is a recent graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing. She has presented various pieces at Oberlin’s Translation Symposium, and she wrote her senior honors thesis on twentieth-century Dominican poetry, largely due to Miller’s influence on her intellectual and artistic development. She is currently living in Indonesia as part of the Shansi Fellowship.

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