100 Refutations | Cuba | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018You want to study the night of my spirit
There, in the pit of my soul
the place never reached
by the clear sunlight of hope
But don’t ask me what sleeps
beneath the veil of speechless shade;
stop beside the abyss, and weep
as if by the edge of a grave
Juana Borrero was born in Havana in 1877 and died in Key West in 1896 at the age of nineteen. She was born into a family of intellectuals: her father and all her siblings wrote verses which were later compiled and published under the title Versos familiares.
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.