100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018You smoke, you fit in the ashtray too
You contemplate, turned off
by the fire
your home;
And you watch man
betraying man
eve
of another day
without morning.
(The betrayal,
the one hand
washing the other
as both
spite
the face)
*
Vicente Acosta (1867-1908) was a Salvadoran poet, professor, and politician. He was widely published in Salvadoran journals and magazines, and in 1904 founded La Quincena, a journal of scientific and cultural studies.
Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. earned MFAs in creative nonfiction writing and literary translation from The University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous Press and Don’t Come Back from Mad River Books, as well as editor, with Sarah Viren, of the forthcoming anthology Essaying the Americas. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation work has been featured in journals including Bellingham Review, Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers, and The Sunday Rumpus, among others. She won Best of the Net and Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus, Ohio to Richmond, Virginia, where she works as an assistant professor for Virginia Commonwealth University. Visit www.linawritesessays.com.
English translation copyright (c) Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., 2018.