Excerpt:
What you wait for is a lost child jumping over a puddle of water, or the enticing fall to explore gravity, or a mischievous attempt to deviate the winds to expose your face to a foreign smell, to the freshness of the woods, and the music of those unquiet crickets ciphering future messages in the distance.
The core of reality is a craving beast. Its fur of absence covers the sky at night, when you dive into the enjoyment of the sleeping gaze, when you can only trust the touch, the sound, and the trembling presence of the matter breathing by your neck, and you want to grasp something, anything. The objects do not stay still, they nest some sort of movement in their infinite surface, toward their actual countenance, to their incandescent geography, the path of their underground water.
Minimal creatures wait for a minimal paradise with running water and a microwave. They dressed in shiny colors to fight chaos. They cast their own laws of resistance, like a flirty frog yearning for the continuation of the species. They sense the threat and go to their den. They smell political correctness and lick their wounds in the shadows.
Nothing moves without a purpose, but purpose is an empty room, where to hide, where to long for a room full of rooms that would keep you forward, and here you are again in the lingering hiatus of the purpose, but purpose is a hungry machine, it is the clock that defies your presence, denying the assemblage of your pieces, and on this side of the creaking door you plot how to defeat the purpose with the pose of your dark naked body, with the tremors and alliances of your skin. Look how powerful! For generations, your fingers have created space and time for your teeth and your elbows to occupy their fiber and not leaky rooms.
Ethel Barja Cuyutupa was born in Huanchar, Junin, Peru and she is the author of Trofeo imaginado entre dientes (2011), Gravitaciones (2013), Insomnio vocal (2016), and Travesía invertebrada (2019). Her work can be found in Voces al norte de la cordillera: Antología de voces andinas en los Estados Unidos (2016), Revista Lucerna (Peru), Los Bárbaros (EE.UU.), alba.lateinamerika lesen, and Lateinamerika Nachrichten (Germany). She participated in Latinale International Poetry Festival in 2018 (Germany) and received Cartografía Poética Prize 2019 (Peru). Her work has been translated into French, German, Portuguese, and English. She holds an MA in Hispanic Literature and Culture by University of Illinois at Chicago and a PhD in Hispanic Studies by Brown University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Salisbury University and the director of Gociterra. Hope is Tanning on a Nudist Beach is her first poetry collection conceived and published in English.
Visit www.ethelbarja.com
