Illustration by Anne Le Guern

Spanish

Listen:

English

Listen:

I look in the mirror

I look at the Indian women

I look at the colonizer

I spread my legs

and shove

              flowers
              cactus
              animal
              god

the cosmos inside me

I explain to the god

with a female bird’s face

that I have nothing inside

that it’s just a creator’s fantasy

that in me no one can be born

because nothing survives

***

exiled

              illiterate

                           errant

                                        b o r d e r l i n e

I want to be

gold     india      morena

Una india

who makes them

forget my history

and a part of yours

Bird doesn’t want to be god

or to have the face of a bird

She has existential attacks

and would like to read anything

other than a calendar

She wants to dance this night

of skulls without flags

to smoke on buds in bloom

between seas

cactus and desert

between jungle and dew

***

To lie outstretched beneath heavenly bodies

of ancient gods

and reject her forefathers

             I called her

Ngünechen & Quetzalcoatl

Negrita     Ñaña     Compa

We speak in tongues

of sad days

and of hunger

a hunger that can only

be spoken

when you are hungry

She didn’t want to be an ancestor

I tell her that I didn’t either

And so we say our goodbyes

listening to songs

on this old wurlitzer

that snuffs the glow of war

             in this final dance.

Daniela Catrileo
Daniela Catrileo (b. 1987) is a Mapuche poet, activist, and professor of philosophy. She has published multiple collections of poetry, including Río herido (2016) and Guerra florida (2018), and two chapbooks: El territorio del viaje (2017) and Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (2020). Her collection of short stories, Piñen (2019), was honored by the prestigious Premios Literarios in Chile as the Best Literary Work in the short story category.

Edith Adams
Edith Adams is a literary translator of Spanish into English. She is currently completing her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Southern California and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Literary Translation Workshop, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.