100 Refutations: Day 32

Grotto

Before the gravitation: strong men. Sturdy.
***Song and cadence.

Before the melody a fissure in the moss.
***Precision and fall.

Before the performance someone was already singing the water’s pulse.

Underworld.

Every year the circus brings a tiger. White. Crestfallen.

Before the gravitation the children already entranced.
Magic scatters (shoulders) along the bank.
Enchantment of broken savagery.

And those thighs.

Siberia would have been an eternal landscape but no. No.
For the girl, the enchantment would be born in spring.

Je pars en voyage sur les ailes.

Reserves and borders where thighs and femurs are only ciphers.

Every year the circus exhibits the biggest beetle in the world.

A man writes a single line on the bank: Thighs.
On your thighs, in them, the designated territory.

The performance of the Hans Heiling overture.

The tiger is a slice of the desert on fire,
brought to life by your eyes. White. Crestfallen.

Clearing away the scraps / creature dotted with edges / the execution,
***of a man.

*******Perform the background music.

The woman (concert musician) blows kisses to the crowd.

Bios

Rocío Cerón

Rocío Cerón is one of the foremost poets and performance artists of her generation. Her work enacts a dialogue between languages and combines poetry with sound experimentation, performance, and video to create spaces of transcreation. Her volumes of poetry include Basalto (2002), Imperio/Empire (2008), Tiento (2010), Diorama (2012), and Borealis (2016). Her poems have been translated into many European languages.

Anna Rosenwong

Anna Rosenwong is a translator, editor, poet, and educator. She won the Best Translated Book Award for Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, and her collection of poetry by José Eugenio Sánchez, here the sun’s for real, is due out soon. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, The University of Iowa, and the American Literary Translators Association. She is the translation editor of Anomaly. Her scholarly and creative work has been featured in such venues as World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Translation Studies, Asymptote, Two Lines, Words without Borders, Jacket2, and Modern Poetry Today. Chapbooks include suite prelude a/h1n1 and climax with double cheese (José Eugenio Sánchez), ​AND THE OWNERS OF THE WORLD NO LONGER FEAR US (Victoria Guerrero Peirano), and By Way of Explanation (Anna Guercio Rosenwong). She holds an MFA from The University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. More at annarosenwong.com.

Copyright (c) Rocío Cerón. English translation copyright (c) Anna Rosenwong, 2018.