Luís Guerra

RESISTANCE OF ASHES
2008-2009 (Excerpts)
translated by Erín Moure

THEY WERE ENTRAILS SWALLOWING

THEMSELVES
PERPETUALLY BELOW THINGS

PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES

BREAKING APART ON
THE ICEFIELDS

IN THE DREAM
MY EYES WERE BLINDFOLDED
SOMEONE WAS KISSING ME
TO KEEP ON BREATHING

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 Along the coastline
The bodies bloated up fermented
Mouths stuck open
Asphyxiated fishes
Thirsty beyond belief
Flies and gulls
Pecking their cheeks
It’s turkey sex in the backyard of the house
That I watch through an old curtain
Hidden from Adult Eyes
Their eyes open wide
Everything suddenly goes empty
Pockmarks
Everything an impenetrable landscape of holes
They looked like burst octopuses
Blood-brilliant
It’s the landowners who set fire to the jungle and swallow the bodies of indian women
Their orange nipples
Embraced by merchandise, marked with numbers, letters and signs

THE FLIES STILL BUZZING OR ELSE IT WAS THE PLASTIC BAGS

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THEY WERE CARRYING OFF
THE TONGUES OF OTHERS
ALIVE
IN THEIR JAWS
AND OUT DROPPED BRIGHT
BONES OF INDIANS

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 Like dank archipelagos of invalids
That still squirm
Lying on the beaches
Sun and sea make their mouths disgorge
The most marvelous modifications of flesh

Manifestations of an earlier epoch

Of the skin
Where fire was still swirled up with foam
Blood coral spread out of them
Amoebae in their testicles
Mushrooms that drove them blind
Tongues heard only by seashells it seems on the shore.

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 PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES
BREAKING APART ON THE ICEFIELDS

THEY WERE ENTRAILS SWALLOWING THEMSELVES

PERPETUAL BENEATH THINGS

IN THE DREAMS
I HAD
MY EYES BLINDFOLDED
SOMEONE WAS KISSING MY FACE AND EYELIDS
SO AS TO KEEP BREATHING
THEY TOLD ME

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A DARK TONGUE IN THE STREETS

children

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With makeshift bombs
In garbage bags

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 Bodies in the rivers
Uncorrupted
Pristine bodies
Unconscious
Of weather or wind
Shut out of phenomenal existence
Without clothes

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 PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES
EMPTIED OUT OF THEMSELVES
UNCORRUPTED IN THE RIVERS
OUTSIDE TIME
ALL THE DISAPPEARED
SHOW US THEIR WOUNDS
THEIR LOVE FOR US
THEIR RESISTANCE OF ASHES

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They all stopped speaking
They grope on the ground
Noiseless
Eyes rolling out of their orbits
Opening however they can
Their mouths
I went right up to them
Had nothing in mind but to piss in their faces
To not show them any respect
Gods were disarmed like that
Their feet tied so long that their limbs lost all sense of mobility
The gags finally severed their tongues and their teeth dropped into centuries
Crocodiles of plastic
They hardly defecate and they guzzle their own excrement again

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 All the disappeared prisoners

Are back

And staring at us

NO FORGIVENESS NO FORGETTING

They sing

“Never again in Chile”

They sing

“So that never again”

They sing

And they show us their skins

Their love for us

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SO WE’RE PRISTINE TOO

EACH AND ALL OF THE BODIES

WE HUG AND KISS

TO KEEP ON LIVING

IN THE OPEN AIR

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Luís Guerra
MESOPOTAMIA
2005-2008
(Excerpts)
translated by Erín Moure

Ithaca stank of piss and beached corpses,

pointlessly poked into the ground like bats,
like babies wrapped up in cellophane,
messy packets of drowned french fries,
they proliferate in the marshes in the bay.
A morning delayed in all the glitz of what’s happened,
a land inundated in caravels like spaceships,
Ithaca bitch dog dungridden and putrid
Stinking of piss,
Achaean Agamemnon,
penis and testicles in the air.

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as for us we’re lost
between the abyss
that we are and the permanent
coma that we live in

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The invincible armada
nonetheless could not
fend off the frail English schooners
easier to maneuver
in the fickle seas of the Channel,
and the grotesque dirigibles of the Spanish in the end were split open,
whales conquered and bitten,
washed up,
wracked with fever,
as if in the throes of childbirth.

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A LINE OF ANTS RUNNING HUNGRILY TO A COCA-COLA CAP