BIOS
Translator's Bio: Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he completed his MFA at Florida International University in Miami. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2016, Gulf Coast, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in South Florida.
Poet's Bio: Francisco Henriquez Rosa was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic in 1957. He graduated from the Dominican Journalism Institute in 1979 and in the same year immigrated to New York City where he attended Hostos Community College. His poetry has been published in magazines and newspapers throughout Argentina, Dominican Republic, New York, and Florida. He currently lives in Orlando where he is the coordinator of the writing group "La Tertulia de Orlando.”
Insomnia
Sleepless
scorpion
serpent
with night filled wings
a river
that hardly enjoys its shores
canon
with mysterious shells
endless
walkway
that
takes you
to the
place you don’t go
you are
like this, something like a mirror
where I
don’t see myself
a
crying smile
a sea
of condemned salt.
To see
the light in darkness
of a
obliged night
to
ignore the pillow
and
give way to nightmares
of
being awake.
Fly
that digs
the
strange sound of silence
moaning
the pain of being alive
when
death
is a
crab
that walks
between the sheets
and
stars.
I
should sleep
I
scream
with a
hunger for peace
and
yawn
I
should sleep
with
boiling blood
in this
darkness
I
should sleep
with my
borrowed eyes
and
groping heart.
Poem for the sea
Mirrored
blue, or green?
From a
thousand faces
you
resemble a night-breeze
and a
storm.
Weave
your light of salt
into
every rock you illusioned
with
these tide strikes
that
mark your torment.
Sea,
flattering and dense
sea of
loves and illusions
sea
that remembers
how in
childhood
it was
a giant
that
never learned how to laugh.
Today I
consider you from afar
yearning
your salted sound
and
your foamy love
like
celestial sperm
waiting
to find the flirting shore.
Your
depth is not your beginning
or your
color, your monument
the
horizon, your friend
that
makes believe you’re too far
disguising
its arms in distance
making
a port of a goodbye.
Silence’s shadow
I
stared, fixated
in
black and white
searching
the
brightness
of your
eyes,
lost
desire.
I
didn’t blink
she
stared back at me
seeking
in me
the
reality of a life
that
won’t end.
I saw
her mouth
her
nose
even
her facade
and
whole face
marvelous
in its mystery.
I
blinked
from
staring so much,
no.
I
smiled, seeing
from
above and below
from
neck
to the
final breeze
of her
black hair,
and
her, not even
a grin
of life,
only
silence’s shadows.
Like
this I slept
staring
and
awoke to her
in my
left hand
with my
thumb
caressing the photo.