Translated from the Spanish by Carmen Yus Quintero
Cocoa Puffs and MDMA
i’m going to dress like a cereal and break into your body.
i’m going to put some of your favorite cells into a
sports bag.
i’m going to hide in your belly and swim in gastric juice
until the cops leave.
your liver is going to get me a fake passport because your liver
works for me.
in my fake passport i’ll be a tropical fruit named after a
dictator from the 20th century.
i’m going to escape through your mouth when you vomit because you’re
allergic to tropical fruit.
i’m going to disappear for a while and every christmas i’ll send you
postcards
of me sunbathing with your cells naked on a beach in west
papua (indonesia).
you won’t hear from me
until a few years later
they release the movie of our story.
it’ll be a box-office bomb.
we should move-in together before i forget about it.
we could function like those dolls that close their eyes when you
lay them down.
we could stay plugged into a coffee maker to survive.
we could get the citizenship of an exotic
country
eating with our hands in the embassy restrooms.
we have to settle on a plan
in case they ask
what we were high on
when we first met.
Kinder Triste (Cries in Spanish)
mom says i’m ruining my body.
i tell her i didn’t touch anything,
it was already broken when she gave it to me.
the tv says that two out of three people make the other one
feel lonely.
the best part about living is how much fun it has become
to enjoy the things that make me feel like a living failure.
i hope the eyes that see me die are not the ones
of a doctor.
i hope the ceiling i see before i die is not that
of a hospital.
i hope a rock learns how to breathe with the oxygen that’s left
when i die.
i hope you rest on that rock when you are tired
of running away from me.
i hope the next time i see you, you’ve already read
the illustrated book of my body.
i hope you like what i’m doing with your memories.
i have around a million problems and cold hands.
i only own my body when nobody’s looking.
time slips away between my fingers
if i don’t take my hands out of my pockets.
i’m going to get out of bed
and i’ll try to disappoint as many people
as possible.
i hope they at least name the dead-end street
where they find my body after me.
before i die i want to disappoint every person in the world
at least once.
Trankimazin 2MG
i dream that i run in slow motion from my bed to
the bathroom
and i feel that i can’t go forward and when i look back i realize
that the girl i lost my virginity to is holding
onto my waist
and when i ask her to let me go she doesn’t let me go
but when i tell her that i love her she lets me go and evaporates
and when i get to the bathroom i stick my face to the mirror
to make sure
that my pupils still have their original size
that my pupils are still smaller than the rest
of my face
because i feel my pupils will dilate until they take up
my whole eye
and they’ll keep dilating until they take up my whole face
and they’ll leave my body but won’t stop dilating
and they’ll leave the planet earth but won’t stop dilating
until they become planets
until they occupy the place they deserve in the solar system
until they have their own moon and their own population
that’ll take their own drugs to dilate their own pupils
that’ll dilate until they’re ready
to occupy the place they deserve in the solar system.
everybody knows that’s the way the universe has
of expanding.
You Dance Like an Indian Goddess (SANTERÍA)
when you get old you’ll be crazy and you’ll live with a ton
of arctic whales
and the kids in the neighborhood will know you
as the crazy arctic whale lady.
the whales will communicate with each other by ultrasound
and you’ll communicate with them
by hanging dead fish on the doorknobs
and controlling the frequency
of how much you look out the window to exercise your right
to not understand the scenery.
you’re a city that never sleeps because it can’t sleep
with other cities by its side.
you have a sixth sense for looking at the sea.
you have the perfect body for stumbling into the corners of
things.
with tiny lies you can induce huge changes in
people’s mood.
you have inherited your dad’s collection of failures and your mom’s
virginity.
you know how to recognize a romantic comedy when you see it.
you talk to people to make things jealous.
for each right decision you make a thousand wrong decisions
and the wrong decisions
laugh at the right decision and slam it against the lockers
and give it
eating disorders and now the right decision doesn’t want to
go to class and just stays home
watching porn starring the existential dilemmas of
eastern european teenagers.
at the end of the day you think about all the people
who shouldn’t have made it through the day.
the doorbell rings: it’s your best friend’s boyfriend
here to help you with math.
you grab a box of cookies and ask your mom for
the closest thing to privacy you can get.
your hands touch when they try to wipe the saliva he spits
as he says your name.
he thinks he knows you because he knows that you know that the tangent of 45°
is equal to one.
www.LiveJasmine.com
i can’t touch things without it looking like i want to use them.
i don’t know if i’m hungry or if it’s been a long time since we last talked.
i want to run away but i’m afraid i won’t know when to stop.
i want to be quiet before you and let it leave marks
on your skin.
i want to be aware of my limitations during the day
and let them exhaust me at night.
i want you to learn what love is
so you forget it when you have to explain it in front
of a lot of people.
i’m uncomfortable
with the comfort of knowing that
whatever i do
i’ll always be.
sometimes i’d like to be sad for a living
to have a privet driver that takes me from my bed to the shower.
i isolate myself from the people around me to be completely
sure
that the root of all my problems begins and ends with me
sometimes i open the window and look up at the sky and feel tiny
compared to the expectations people have about the sky,
and i think about the intersection between my comfort zone
and the purple wall in your room,
and i think about all of the things that haven’t killed me
and i imagine you doing them in your pajamas on saturday night,
and i use your body to measure the distance between my goals and myself.
every time i touch you my hands discover a new planet
not suitable for the life of more than one human being.
from here i see you looking at the camera with your eyes red
and separated teeth.
i wish you were a bit closer so i could touch you
or a bit farther away so i wouldn’t even try.
Hannah Montana (The Monster that Lives in My Inbox)
laying on your bed we’re like animals that seen from
the sky have the shape of a cloud.
we are still alive because we hate the same things:
the pink carpet in your parents’ room, cereal
without chocolate.
the pink carpet in your parents’ room, december of
2010,
the place where i lost the notion of space-time for the
first time.
the bathroom door where that night i wrote with your lipstick
“i would like to die four or five times because of your
sticky hands.”
teach me that ferrets can die if they don’t have
enough sex.
summarize your body for me so i can learn to love
the things i don’t understand.
i’m sorry, i need my body’s permission to learn how to
show my feelings.
we’re one bungle closer to seeing
there’s nothing there to bungle up to.
i’m sorry, my fingers have commitment issues.
i’m sorry, we’ll need our future children’s
consent
to get high again in your little sister’s room
while she and her friends rehearse their christmas dance in the
living room.
show me the weatherman wasn’t right.
teach me all you know about the purple wall
in my room.
teach me how useful my hands can be when used as
weather patterns.
help me to trick my belly.
teach me that bananas and prozac have similar
chemical properties.
teach me how to swim because i want to die at the seashore.
teach me how to have a house with a fireplace.
whisper your resume into my ear.
Kyoto Protocol (Purple Rain)
i feel like a gas that becomes poisonous when trying to
please other gases,
expanding to fill an empty room without anyone wanting to
breathe me in,
starting conversations with people i don’t care about
so that you disappear from my recent conversations,
convincing myself that it’s okay
not having anyone to convince me of things,
waiting for the government to ban the things you can do
without me,
trying to get people to call the air i breathe
“atmosphere,”
trying to get my eyes to say about me what the eyes of
someone that loves me say,
trying to accept that you weren’t sure about the 30-day free trial
of my body.
i try to touch the sky but i know that the clouds won’t let me.
everyone’s an expert on other people’s problems
yet nobody knows who to choose to be an expert on
their own.
everyone’s happy when they don’t know what to say.
a fun game is comparing my life to the one that cereal boxes
promise me
and making sure that the more cereal i eat the less they look alike.
i hope you think about me when you have nothing better to do
on monday mornings.
i’m scared because sundays have a plan to
take over the world
based on making people think that mondays are the days that
mistreat children.
i’m a grown up, i don’t need anyone to disappoint me, i can
disappoint myself.
my body is about to lose a lot of important information
but i don’t care
because I made the last back up copy
when i was still important in someone’s life.
they didn’t include my hands in the latest update
of your body.
do you remember last summer when i took apart your whole body
and put every part of your body on my bed and
cleaned them one by one and when i put them back together
i had one extra face because you always had two and i
had just never realized.
Óscar García Sierra was born in León, Spain, in 1994. He studied Spanish, Language and Literature at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and he published his first book, Houston, yo soy el problema, in 2016. At that time, he was also very active in social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, and he managed the blog site Iwanna meet Krystle Cole. His poetry is part of Spain’s alternative literature, and his work has appeared in the alt/lit journal New Wave Vomit, the Tumblr Ciudades Esqueleto, the news and media website Playground and the poetry magazine Revista tn, among others.
Carmen Yus Quintero is a master’s candidate in Spanish Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has a bachelor’s degree in Translation, Interpreting and Applied European Languages by the University of Granada (Spain,) the University of Aix-Marseille (France) and the University of Ghent (Belgium). She is interested in linguistics, foreign language acquisition and education.
World Poetry Review 