The jury of the eighteenth RNE – Montemadrid Foundation Young Poetry Award found this collection to be “a cohesive work, demonstrating poetic maturity, with musicality, solid endings, and evocative imagery.”
At Zenda we publish five poems from Latitud cero (Pre-Textos), by F. Javier Cárdenas García.
HALF THE WORLD
The point closest to the sun from Earth
is a hollow up at the summit of a volcano.
Nearby are souvenir shops
that offer coca tea for half a dollar
and gloves made from alpaca wool;
for fifty cents they let you take
a photograph with a poster
or ascend to an altar carved from stone
where you can touch the sun.
This corner of earth
filled with ultraviolet radiation and snow
is a fruit split in two.
Was this what they call the end of the world,
a hole beneath our feet, another threshold?
If I climb onto this rock,
I can keep the light of the world
in my pocket.
Never have I been so far from my dead.
GMT-5
To be able to speak with you, I can
move the clock forward by six hours. My luggage
is the understanding that I can
recite by heart the exact hour you rise,
you will drink a cup of strong coffee,
you tie your hair back or search for the hospital pajamas
in the heap of dirty clothes,
fifteen minutes before you go to save
the tiny world of a patient.
An hour is the size of the child who drifts away
from her, even if she cannot hold him.
To be able to speak with you, I can
subtract the other side of a sunset
that we have watched die in our arms.
Time carries within it the news of a cage,
someone must keep it
so that it can continue empty.
ISABELA
I have all the pain I need.
I have all night to watch the sea:
the island is a besieged ship
that devours the eggs of the galápago.
I carry the scent of the blue-footed booby
and also the defeat of a crab
that turned to liquid snow at dusk.
I have seen fireflies die
inside lapis-lazuli caves
full of innocent sharks
and at the sunset of many beaches
that keep the children’s pockets
to draw gaps of heaven in their miracles.
I have seen giant avocado trees
sprout on the exhausted outskirts
and in the turtle drowned in an inkwell
that will not reach three hundred years.
I have all night to watch myself die;
I walk and it does not seem like I am walking,
to record my steps before the sea often implies
exposing myself to being erased.
I have all the pain I need.
TUNGURAHUA
It means a throat of heat
that has arrived without being called. Home
of relieved turquoise and faceless hummingbirds like small drops
of God and of ash, that lift the basalt churches and the tactile
clarity of the vulture that sinks into the rupture of this self that writes itself.
This self repeated many times, clumsy and eruptive, that wishes to present itself as nourishment.
This self, inescapable and crimson, that clings to a swing from which one sees
only temperature, that inhabits the ever-changing-colored beer
of Irish pubs and wants to bury itself in the rafting vessels
and in the yellow suit of climbers to form a whole of light and cement.
This self perhaps dwelling in the tiny nostalgia of cinnamon-colored crepe paper,
that tried to be a forest of free cavities where to drop the plaster
and the unripe banana, and snack of tiger cat and cracklings to wash away
the blood of orphaned mosquitos that die at the end of the waterfalls where shamans went.
This self that traverses dark mountains and the death of a bird,
that is on the goat drenched in foam and song, that walks again without purpose
in the sung femur and in the common grass of the Municipal Coliseum that guards
the distance of all the migrants of America and their thousand thirty dusty towns
with houses like shells of toasted corn and plesiosaur, that say Tungurahua
with the Inca’s glottis; that say bird, penguin, guinea pig, flower with animal dentition.
All this self, like a freshly sown skeleton, takes its mestizo possession
at the door of Quechuan schools and in the mane of molten chambers
that are solar mares ready to ignite, celebrating the first
cry of independence. This self that is here beside its edge
with a great bell of conjuring. A self that is not a catastrophe, but the continuation
of a frost that moans like the beak of the condor that bores into flesh,
and is that self that one day will become a poem,
that self which will come without being called.
THE MAIZALES’ GRAVE
He has offered us a zambo juice that he grows
in the back of his plot
and the last clean cup he can offer us.
Without rain you cannot wash the pots,
and the weathering accumulates at the summit
of the mountain where the two alone live.
It is the tenth day that her husband has not
eaten anything, three years since he stopped moving,
she covers the holes grown in the adobe house,
and with newspaper she covers the walls,
she suffers from Parkinson’s and cannot pay
for more medicines. When all this ends
there will be an empty place at the top of the world.
I think of her with voices without certainty
and I seek her in the breeze that brushes
the cornfields without weight.
—————————————
Author: F. Javier Cárdenas García. Title: Latitud cero. Publisher: Pre-Textos. Availability: All Your Books.