Andrea Cote Botero
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott
María,
I speak of the mountains where life grows slowly
the ones that don’t dwell in my port of light,
where all is desert and ash
and your smile is a look faded away.

It’s January there, the month of the unburied dead
and the earth is the first corpse.
María,
don’t you remember?
don’t you see?
There our voices are dried up
like our skin
and our heels burn
for not pressing to know
about houses set to fire.

I speak, María,
of this earth, the thirst I live
and the bed where life is laid to rest.

Stop to consider, little girl,
this isn’t living
and life is anything else that exists
damp in the ports where water does bloom,
and each stone isn’t a fire.

Remember, María,
that we are
feasts for dogs and birds,
scorched men,
empty shells
of what we were before.
What are you made of?, my girl,
Why do you think you can stitch the crevice to the landscape
with the thread of your voice,
when this earth is a wound bleeding
in you and in me
and in all things
made of ash?
On our earth,
ravens watch us with your eyes
and flowers wither
out of hate for us
and the earth breaks open holes
urging us to die.
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Cover Art for Chaucer: A European Life
The European Life of Geoffrey Chaucer

"In 1366, a notary in Navarre recorded a grant of safe passage to 'Geoffrey de Chauserre, English squire' throughout the small Iberian kingdom in the Pyrenees. This Navarrese notary didn’t know it at the time, but he had put to paper a 'life-record'—one more fleeting archival appearance by Geoffrey Chaucer, Middle English poet, as he went about the less poetic business of soldiery, civil service, and diplomacy over the course of his life (c. 1343–1400)."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Susan Tichy's handwritten lines from "Logging"
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Gary Snyder's
"Logging"

"I was eighteen when I picked up the original edition of Snyder’s Myths & Texts...I had been writing poems for several years, and even had published a few, but something new happened in those pages: I heard/saw for the first time how a web of sound could juxtapose unadorned image + simple statement into something…not exactly larger than its parts, but other than its parts. No longer were expansive and intensive poetics opposed: they were allies, creating the voice of a mind and a body finding place on earth."
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