IMPURE POETRY. Nuria Amat. Translated: Peter Bush.

1.

She thinks her house

the writer of her woes

wields the brick like a gritty

pen, her hand bloody

from raising so many walls,

just blacked out a window

with a firmament

alcove-dark

stone is her thought,

stone her silent smile,

stone her bed, her tongue, her kitchen,

the way into the house

is across her heart.

Don’t.

Her existence is a hard place.

She won’t greet you.

Words choked by pain escape

like a couple in uniform

while her cats philosophize

in the yard and ask the heavens

about the man resting

or the cleft of the sex

of the woman entrenching

in her bedroom.

2.

A man smiles at me

by the traffic lights,

I accelerate my eyes,

better not say a word,

really my mind turns grey

as I spurn his dare,

no sweetness or hope greets

the shock of love denied

he satisfies his (human?) desire

to invent women with pigeons,

if I glance his way,

my smile will earn a solemn reprimand,

then come sackings of high altars,

offerings of climacteric flesh,

keys, a hotel, a number perhaps,

stains, scent of a streetlamp interlude,

airy gestures,

whatever,

homicide.

3

Resist body,

Snail in the night,

reduced to larva,

cupboard without darkness,

severed poem,

failed coitus,

life.

4.

I, a wait

in your suicide prison, dry

is the food you offer,

dead the nights on my plate,

hard the bed your passion vomits,

I tell the wall:

life is too busy,

don’t write me.

My cell, deaf to your calls,

begs the willow you not to

insist on visiting me,

a nail in your smile.

5.

I propose my house become a sanatorium,

white walls bare and soundless,

voices falling like leaves,

cupboards open to nightly despair,

I will give out the medicine,

you will see to the business

of restoring the patient to his shirt,

possibly then,

between your self-sacrifice

and my temerity,

the mad will escape.