We Draw All Kinds of People

*

April 22nd. Incompetent

It’s seven o’clock:
throw two trash bags from the balcony.
Turn on the oven for the Middle Eastern food
and the book of Go down to the end of the night:

to the friend that dies at the hands of a madwoman,
nobody feels like closing his eyelids.

*

April 29th. Drinking spoiled wine

The fridge has always brought on
the passions that overflow the schedule.
The list disagrees with her stomach
that presupposes one problem per can:
the milk for the night, the cheese for the pillow,
the soy for the martyrdom of
the nation is inaugurated in us, the servants

*

May 1st. Wants to jump

There is a need to be clear
a voice that is as mature as it
is floating because the ball is rubber,
it resists when it’s pushed under water.

*

May 24th

Tomorrow is a holiday: the way the species suffers with
a snack, offers evidence.
There is no
pure milk and there is no bread:
The loneliness of the spirit
has hypotonic ideas.

*

May 25th

The epigonal holiday curses us
like a worn stanza
little revelations in the shape of a fold,
poorly sewn, compelling the shirt:
that time when the power went out and they didn’t propose
to use candles and crayons to paint,
the melancholy of making collages with magazines,
scissors and coating samples,
a family with aspirations of changing
the kitchen table set

*

June 24th. To polish, to scratch

He wipes with a cloth,
he makes symmetrical the wet parts that he wipes with the cloth
but leaves crumbs
every time he grabs a cookie.

Already at nine, he felt life
wasn’t going to make him less nervous.

Not knowing how to enjoy things is a slow blow, and he’s blind
the guest who does not even contribute
a pound of noodles per week

*

July 7th. We don’t live in the country

Each bus that goes by with its injury
wants to repeat with its engine:
“it’s not gonna happen,
no truck is going to kidnap us,”
that won’t take place without the body of the future.

The goat cannot be revived.
She died while we were biting the grass.

Bios

Paula Peyseré

Paula Peyseré was born in Buenos Aires in 1981. Her books of poetry include Las afueras (Siesta, 2007), Predicciones (Ediciones Presente, 2012), Telepatía (Determinado rumor, 2012), and Todo el tiempo de cero (Club Hem, 2015).

Carlos Soto Román

Carlos Soto Román is a Chilean pharmacist, poet, and translator. He holds a master's degree in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published in the U.S.: Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths, 2011), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF, 2013), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press, 2014), and The Exit Strategy (Belladonna, 2014). As a translator he has published in Chile: Do or DIY: Autoedición, Apropiación, Recontextualización y Plagio (Das Kapital, 2013), Bart by Ron Silliman (Cuadro de Tiza, 2014), café café by Aram Saroyan (Libros del Pez Espiral, 2015), Patriotismo by Ryan Eckes (Libros del Pez Espiral, 2015), and Por favor, no más poesía by Derek Beaulieu (Libros del Pez Espiral, 2017).

Copyright (c) Paula Peyseré, 2007. English translation copyright (c) Carlos Soto Román, 2017.