Translated from the Spanish by Toshiya Kamei

 

garden

my mother had a butterfly garden and every day she
watered their roots with the sap of her sobbing with
the wet crust of her tears she weaved a line of words
that only the butterflies knew how to decode they in
return only gave her the silence of their wings from
their aerial vertigo the hushed breathing of their
fragile bodies now my mother is dead and the
butterflies are gone from the garden

 

tree

behind broken fruits or never pronounced names between
riddles of sap and chlorophyll next to the silence of
crusts torn into pieces in a void under this other
mode of breathing leaf by leaf falls winters and dead
afternoon hours like the tree I have been from my
shadow I look at you I’m just a silhouette a tree
ghost that wakes up in the thirst of your roots

 

hat

I didn’t want the rain to wet my memories so I put on
this old hat in silence I put it on all the things
I’ve forgotten all the names I lost I didn’t want the
wind to snatch away the voices of my past the brown
silhouette of my doubts but the truth is it doesn’t
rain today nor is it windy and there’s nobody in this
town to see my hats rolling on the ground

 

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Sara Uribe was born in Querétaro, Mexico, in 1978. Her most recent collection, Palabras más palabras menos, won the Premio Nacional de Poesía Tijuana in 2005. She currently lives in Tampico, in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Toshiya Kamei is the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories (Host Publications, 2007) and is an MFA student in Translation at the University of Arkansas. His translations have appeared in various literary journals, including Burnside Review, International Poetry Review, and The Modern Review.