NEW YORK translation: REVIEW

((aquí hay un fragment de la explosión))

1

RESET

THERE ARE PLANES IN THE AIR

(Montparnasse, 1999 - Nubegris, 2001)


IN MONTPARNASSE cemetery, at six in the evening, Rachel goes up to the tomb of Cesitar Vallejo and spreads her knees.

THREE LEAVES OF A LILY fall from the sky and a late drop of semen wearily descends along her groin. I’m completely exhausted and completely exhausted I try to decipher love’s traps in the sky: from that love of light music nothing saves us, nothing more remains. A plane appears in the sky.

I SLIDE MY HAND INSIDE HER JEANS and I feel the cold sweat between her thighs. A white line has formed in the sky, I watch. That sweat smelling of the crypt will take a long time to dry, I think.
—I want to be a fresh mouth, calm water, only rhythm sometimes, I say.

TWO PLANES cross in the air.

WE ARE in the air.

[Two years later (11S 2001)]:

SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE on the planet, is sending a line of planes against the orange sky, which is sometimes red, streaked with yellow, striated with scarlet, almost ruby.

SOMEONE PREPARES TO DISFIGURE the geometry of the globe, someone wants to erase the coordinates, someone wants, someone seeks, someone plans.

SOMEONE PREPARES TO PRESS the delete key insistently and then the reset button and then everyone will be running away from the line of planes and the four pilots of the Apocalypse: the gathering dust presides over life’s events, we run toward the dust as if it were our only destiny beneath the attentive gaze of the stars.
—I believe they’re bombing New York.

César Gutiérrez Rivas (Arequipa, 1966) is the author of the poetry collection La caída del equilibrista (1997; The Fall of the Tightrope Walker). He has written for journals in Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Lima. Between 2003-05 he camped at Ground Zero to write the novel 80M84RD3R0 (2008-09).
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80M83R (fragment)
Translated by Jason Weiss

Review

New York City