Like Coal
And then you were born,
girl with eyes so black.
Black as the coal your father burns,
like your mother’s skillet,
like the burnt underside of her comal.
Like the eye of the well shot through by darkness.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018And then you were born,
girl with eyes so black.
Black as the coal your father burns,
like your mother’s skillet,
like the burnt underside of her comal.
Like the eye of the well shot through by darkness.
Briceida Cuevas Cob was born in Tepakán, Campeche, Mexico. From 1992 to 1994, she was part of the Maya poetry workshop in the Casa de Cultura de Caliní run by Walderman Noh Tzec. Her work has been widely published and anthologized. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, and in 2010 she became Artistic Creator in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.
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.
Copyright (c) Briceida Cuevas Cob. English translation copyright (c) Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., 2018.