Resistance Of Ashes

Luís Guerra RESISTANCE OF ASHES 2008-2009 (Excerpts) translated by Erín Moure

THEY WERE ENTRAILS SWALLOWING THEMSELVES PERPETUALLY BELOW THINGS PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES BREAKING APART ON THE ICEFIELDS IN THE DREAM MY EYES WERE BLINDFOLDED SOMEONE WAS KISSING ME TO KEEP ON BREATHING

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Along the coastline The bodies bloated up fermented Mouths stuck open Asphyxiated fishes Thirsty beyond belief Flies and gulls Pecking their cheeks It’s turkey sex in the backyard of the house That I watch through an old curtain Hidden from Adult Eyes Their eyes open wide Everything suddenly goes empty Pockmarks Everything an impenetrable landscape of holes They looked like burst octopuses Blood-brilliant It’s the landowners who set fire to the jungle and swallow the bodies of indian women Their orange nipples Embraced by merchandise, marked with numbers, letters and signs THE FLIES STILL BUZZING OR ELSE IT WAS THE PLASTIC BAGS

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THEY WERE CARRYING OFF THE TONGUES OF OTHERS ALIVE IN THEIR JAWS AND OUT DROPPED BRIGHT BONES OF INDIANS

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Like dank archipelagos of invalids That still squirm Lying on the beaches Sun and sea make their mouths disgorge The most marvelous modifications of flesh

Manifestations of an earlier epoch Of the skin Where fire was still swirled up with foam Blood coral spread out of them Amoebae in their testicles Mushrooms that drove them blind Tongues heard only by seashells it seems on the shore.

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PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES BREAKING APART ON THE ICEFIELDS THEY WERE ENTRAILS SWALLOWING THEMSELVES PERPETUAL BENEATH THINGS IN THE DREAMS I HAD MY EYES BLINDFOLDED SOMEONE WAS KISSING MY FACE AND EYELIDS SO AS TO KEEP BREATHING THEY TOLD ME

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A DARK TONGUE IN THE STREETS

children

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With makeshift bombs In garbage bags

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Bodies in the rivers Uncorrupted Pristine bodies Unconscious Of weather or wind Shut out of phenomenal existence Without clothes

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PRISTINE WERE THE BODIES EMPTIED OUT OF THEMSELVES UNCORRUPTED IN THE RIVERS OUTSIDE TIME ALL THE DISAPPEARED SHOW US THEIR WOUNDS THEIR LOVE FOR US THEIR RESISTANCE OF ASHES

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They all stopped speaking They grope on the ground Noiseless Eyes rolling out of their orbits Opening however they can Their mouths I went right up to them Had nothing in mind but to piss in their faces To not show them any respect Gods were disarmed like that Their feet tied so long that their limbs lost all sense of mobility The gags finally severed their tongues and their teeth dropped into centuries Crocodiles of plastic They hardly defecate and they guzzle their own excrement again

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All the disappeared prisoners Are back And staring at us

NO FORGIVENESS NO FORGETTING They sing

“Never again in Chile” They sing “So that never again” They sing

And they show us their skins Their love for us

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SO WE’RE PRISTINE TOO EACH AND ALL OF THE BODIES WE HUG AND KISS TO KEEP ON LIVING IN THE OPEN AIR

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Luís Guerra MESOPOTAMIA 2005-2008 (Excerpts) translated by Erín Moure

1 Ithaca stank of piss and beached corpses, pointlessly poked into the ground like bats, like babies wrapped up in cellophane, messy packets of drowned french fries, they proliferate in the marshes in the bay. A morning delayed in all the glitz of what’s happened, a land inundated in caravels like spaceships, Ithaca bitch dog dungridden and putrid Stinking of piss, Achaean Agamemnon, penis and testicles in the air.

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as for us we’re lost between the abyss that we are and the permanent coma that we live in

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The invincible armada nonetheless could not fend off the frail English schooners easier to maneuver in the fickle seas of the Channel, and the grotesque dirigibles of the Spanish in the end were split open, whales conquered and bitten, washed up, wracked with fever, as if in the throes of childbirth.

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A LINE OF ANTS RUNNING HUNGRILY TO A COCA-COLA CAP

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