By Verónica González Arredondo
Translated by Allison A. deFreese
Spanish
English Translation
Excerpted from Verde fuego de espíritus/Green Fires of the Spirits
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We fled the fire
by boarding barges—
They were giant orchids,
illuminated cocoons
While the flowers of Edo
spread flames everywhere,
inside the orchidarium
we began our game
in shadow
Navigating the night
in a procession lit by luminaries,
we descended
down to the river
—
Mamá,
don’t turn out the light
Something dangerous
is climbing the foot of my bed,
pairs of eyes and legs
Each step, an ascending note,
scaling my nerves with melodies
not from this world
—
It will come for me,
entering through the window,
with a body covered in scales of water and wind
It will come in with the shipwreck
to sing melancholy songs,
holding a small box in its hands
It will enter, its shadow embedding
in the windowpane
the way walls become stained
from murder
Upon opening the box,
a dragon turns into
a firefly streamer
—
I descend, heading down—
to the jaws at the bottom of the staircase
Inside them I feel the cold
There is no door and no knob,
no footsteps looking back
Terror before me
The void surrounding me
—
Mamá,
sing to me
even when the butterflies
get lost in the desert
Sing to me
when the sand dampens my feet
as the bed sinks deeper
Sing to me
when the shadow appears
on the horizon
to cover the earth
Sing to me each night
when I slide below my worm-eaten belly
with its colossal crawling
Sing to me
even if I don’t wake up again
—
With three fingers
you were catching the green spirits
They fled from you
in the darkness—
lights blinking
—
They are fireflies
No
They’re green fires
The ones over there are yellow on the outside
and green inside
Some that are both colors,
their skins turned inside out
No
they are spirits.
Translator’s Note: In her succinct—yet richly imagistic—poetry, Verónica González Arredondo explores arid ecosystems of deserts that were once oceans, as well as themes related to immigration, social justice, femicide, perilous border crossings, and the disappearances of countless girls and women from Central America making the journey to the U.S./Mexican Border. She writes about extinction and survival, disappearing landscapes, displaced peoples, and the inhospitable climate (physically and metaphorically) that remains in their wake.
Verónica González Arredondo (Guanajuato, Mexico) has received several prestigious Latin American literary awards, including Mexico’s National Ramón López Velarde Prize in Poetry/Premio Nacional de Poesía “Ramón López Velarde,” for Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not That Body (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015) as well as the Dolores Castro Prize /Premio Dolores Castro, an annual prize awarded to a woman writing exceptional and socially conscious work in Spanish, for her book Verde Fuegos de Espíritus/Green Fires of the Spirits.
Poet and translator Allison A. deFreese is based in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and coordinates literary translation workshops for the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters. She has previously lived in Mexico and South America. Her literary translations of work by Verónica Arredondo González, Luis Chitarroni, and María Negroni also appeared this spring in Asymptote, Anomaly, Bangalore Review, Burningword, and Waxwing.
Image credit: “Green Smoke” by Flickr
Spanish Read by VERÓNICA GONZÁLEZ ARREDONDO
Translation Read by ALLISON A. DEFREESE