Kim Nekarda, 2022, Watercolour, Acrylic, Ink, Pigment, Photocopy & Body Print on Paper, 54,5 x 44 cm
excerpt from The Garden of Limbs
This selection is from the book From the Founding of the Country (La secta de los perros 2022).
1.
Limbs of each other.
Limbs to be remembered by no one.
We alone.
We grew a garden.
Every dead Sunday we grew a garden of limbs.
Every dead Sunday a garden of daggers in our thighs.
Not to be remembered,
That every Sunday we neglected this labor
Of founding a country
And stayed in bed,
Each growing limbs inside the other.
And not only on Sundays,
All week long, for years,
We neglected the task repeatedly.
Even now, to be honest,
We are really just lying in bed.
2.
But the grass will forgive us.
And the sun will forgive us.
And the cow and the horse and the seagull.
And the sea more than anything will forgive us.
In fact, they’ll be pleased.
And the multiple islands at which we didn’t arrive,
They too will forgive us.
3.
Today dust, I myself become dust.
I do not ask, I become
dust in love with your dust.
Yesterday I was walking carrying all the wounds,
I myself the wounded woman,
Two eyes in front of two solitary eyes,
Milk flowing from the wounds,
dust, today we shatter like dust, one body
Against the other, milk and dust
Form roses of mud.
5.
Massacred, it was beautiful early summer.
6.
But now it’s all forgotten,
dust.
Again, we bury the city in the past.
Again, we rub our bodies against each other.
Again, less and less is left of us.
Maybe, the skin of the roses is left.
Maybe the whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron,
Maybe our limbs.
Maybe your body is left.
Your body I will found on the landscape,
And on the landscape a home,
And I will cut your outline and fold
The paper in the shape of a boat,
And I will sail you.
I promise endless expeditions.
Cristina Pérez Díaz is a poet, translator, and editor from Puerto Rico. She translates from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Spanish. Her English translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona is under contract with Routledge (2022). Her translations from Greek appear weekly in her column “Miel que me das” in the literary supplement En Rojo. She is Founding Editor at The Puerto Rico Review. Her poems and translations have appeared in magazines in Spanish and English, like Asymptote, Periódico de Poesía, Eterna Cadencia, Círculo de Poesía, Distropika, Poesía, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and are forthcoming with Words Without Borders. She is a Doctoral Candidate in Classics at Columbia University. Her book From the Founding of the Country is forthcoming in 2022 with La secta de los perros.