Cristina Rascón Castro

My Bed Is Covered with Clouds

the first cloud came at dawn
like a lost ship to a lighthouse
and touched my body
sleeping under the sheets
the other ones arrived
to the rhythm of crumpled time:
there's no room
for love anymore
the clouds aren't made of cotton
but cyclopean bubbles
I can't feel or see you
through
them
but
my heart
clings to them
the way a cub nestles
in its mother's fur.

Dry

memories
drops of saliva
my heart
is thirsty

the immigrant's psychoanalysis or new age corrido

I'm a piece of wave that didn't reach the sea
a piece of star without sunlight
a tree that didn't split up into pencils
a martyr who doesn't know how to cry

I'm darkness when light rises
a poem when nobody can read
a hobo dandelion ear of wheat
insecticide dust in rooms plaster

I'm a butterfly's wing
with no body to fly
a toad without formalin
uncooked intestines
a rat in a hole (a shrimp after World War IV)

I'm the evil mole from Thumbelina
the stepmother the wolf the crowd that didn't buy a
match
a dead body without a satellite
an embryo about to come out
held breath
a chord
of the last symphony of memory
a chord
that nobody stops to listen to

-- Translated from the Spanish by Toshiya Kamei