Cover photo: Daniel Mordzinski
This poetry collection is a liturgy of fractures, where the word sinks into the muscle and reveals it. Reyes builds a lyrical voice that fragments and recomposes, that knows itself wounded and singing, seed and tear. Each page is a threshold where the flesh speaks, dreams, and burns.
Below we reproduce 5 poems from Historia de la carne (Huerga y Fierro), by Bileysi Reyes.
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When Marosa Was Marosa I Was an Open Window
Sometimes a
moth would also come and alight on me and
convince me and them that the three
were Marosa
Silvia Goldman
To Marosa di Giorgio
When Marosa was Marosa I was an open window and a basket of breads
a rosebud
a pocket of her skirt.
We ran over the tide and hid like fireflies. The temples bit into the countryside: there were wisterias and cardamoms, there were magnolias and fireflies sweetened by salt.
When Marosa was still Marosa I was a wild weasel. Marosa called herself: Marosa.
We called ourselves: Marosa as echo on the hill
and the shout came out from the side.
From then on we broke with tradition
so as never to enter the duel of me refracting onto Marosa nor of Marosa refracting in a mirror
where language is also a house
where detachment is also sunken cheekbones.
The flame pulsed alive in the flesh
it submerged like a tangle of horns over the mouth and over my chest
the blazing weapon shone: the word. Rusted by the missals subjected to the mountains
I fell like a hundred drops of fire among rivers of ash.
*
I gulp in small sips and shape my body alveolating at the tip of your cheek: your thick hands with time-eaten fingers: your hands, fingerprints: backflow of blood to the tip: your hair holds up the corner of the world up to your eyes that burn, that leave splinters in your thick singing voice: your midnight voice in your chest that welcomes mine at your shore: my chest with broad wings: a word of a blurred sea: agrarian units refracted among the compact bone: sphinx bone joined to the marrow: the elbow supports the root in the last quarter: your lips interlace my words up to your ear.
And in what world do you still exist?
*
Pavane for the Thirty-Something Crisis
If all the lamps in the house went out
you could bandage this wound
Anne Carson
my body is a parable
my body mutates without asking for permission:
pores dilated bones that grate
who gave them numbers to the eggs? retinol
sunscreen moisturizers
the girdle is fixed to the flesh
gym extensor major abdominal
eight glasses a day, eight hours of sleep
broccoli cauliflower
broil with the chicken fajitas opens the real wound
burnout five in the afternoon, the street cracked across my epidermis
nipples carve lateral hills
on my chest.
*
on the left wing
the night in its trill
seems to come from the blood
the hollow opens in the hallway
to the marrow
tries to imitate the sobriety of the stem
(to hush is suddenly to become thunder)
in not devouring the tail of the plague
*
The lake has
gone dark, the reedbed sleeps
murmuring in its dream
Herman Hesse
The flesh is that alveolated house on the hill. She searches inside me for vestiges of a blackened face that flew away one August afternoon. I draw near the mirrors that shape her jaws. I am volatile, corrupted in the throat: waiting is always keeping grace, it is not getting unnerved by consuming a blade at the eye of the water. At the center of the light I look toward the abyss, there lies a plain horizontally covered with dried leaves, where there exist houses I will not be able to return to. Her lights carve by moving their black skins. Her eyes, split in the wall, cry for those lights, resent the camouflaged reflections in two million tips: they translate extensively to two and a half kilometers. How much to cry with a ruffled face: the world becomes sepia in the pupil. There are towns like that: lugubrious in their thick, wheeled bustle.
The house has aged with my dream: it has surrendered to the shrinkage and can only burst with tacks turned to mold.
***
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Author: Bileysi Reyes. Title: Historia de la carne. Publisher: Huerga y Fierro. Availability: Todostuslibros.