translated from the Spanish by Emma Trelles

My body has a life of its own. Octopus life.
Life of the hole where I hide.
My heart has again filled with light.
Black butterflies escape beneath my skirt.
It’s late. The world won’t stop annihilating me.
The sun wheels. The heat tires.
Thirty-nine degrees outside the body.
Inside, there’s rain. Surprise! Surprise!
I declare that my son was stillborn.
I hid him in a water tank.
Now he’s solely mine. Summer is maddening.
No one should know that one day I saw an angel.
The sky has a scar behind its cages.
Bread tastes like ash. Surprise! Surprise!
I smell my skeleton’s ash in the bonfire.
It’s early. The world has sentenced me to sew up my vagina,
later my mouth. Nothing should come in or out. Nothing.
Not even the wind.
I am guilty because I smell of fear.