From Nueva Cosecha
XXIV
He explains: when you get shot it doesn’t hurt.
Because a bullet’s pain doesn’t register in your brain
but, rather, in your heart.
The heart can’t distinguish between bullet or bite.
That’s why you die so quickly
because the body is furious it doesn’t feel pain.
It’s different when you get stabbed
because the pain from a wound is recognizable
and you bite your lips to hold in the scream,
have faith
that it’ll soon heal.
But I loved the luminous night of your body
and I made an effort to arrive on time for our conjugal visit.
The conjugal visit was a pigsty that smelled like a fish tank,
where sadness and bitterness coiled around each other
sloshing in the corners a virulent green slime.
Few of us women are lucky enough to be allowed here,
smelling the acrid sweat of other people
considerately concealed beneath yellow sheets.
Only here can I touch his pain.
I believe in his innocence. I believe mistakes were made.
I believe the keys are kept in the carved-out mines of my body
that he tunnels in search of a cleft to freedom,
this moment that we, as women, can offer.
—Today he told me he loves me—declares a woman as we exit
the high security prison;
she gives me a satisfied and complicit smile.
These, the moments of love we bring from the outside world
and that don’t fit in a poem.
Inexplicable moments
like when age spots spread across our cheeks
or an unborn child is lost in a clandestine abortion,
or those tragic moments when there is nowhere to buy cigarettes
or there is no bread for the table, no milk swelling our breasts,
or those moments we never disclose,
when we offer our bodies to the guards
in exchange for a night of love inside a jail cell.
Moments when the night spreads its legs
and, absent of piety, swallows us whole.
It’s not unlike when they declare their love
without mentioning that love is a faultless bullet
that tries to convince us
it won’t kill us.
Elegy for Oblivion
“There is a door to the inferno and only I have the key.”
Alfonso Fajardo
I
In your mouth there is a key, a glimmer of the inferno in your glance, and a love wound
in the morning’s throat.
In you, there is everything and oblivion.
Then, I kissed you as if for the last time and wrapped my fingers around the key to that
inferno. My good luck coin giggles inside the front pocket where I cheat you.
My hands predict your smile will hang in a museum and that it will rain love letters.
I ask you: Who beckons the evil eye and then strolls around the garden? Who cries on the
other side of guilt? Who will pay for this betrayal? You or me?
Together your name and mine are an unpronounceable meteor shower.
II
I confess I hate forgetting and one day you will hate me so much that I will have to forget you and that, my love, hurts.
I will wait for you to call tomorrow. Because if I call you, it is possible I’ll realize you
don’t need me and that, my love, is like going straight to hell.
I suspect that there is no bullet more pathetic than receiving a five hundred page letter
from the Government explaining why I shouldn’t love you and that, my love, is instant
death.
I do not want to negotiate my retirement; I like being at war, waiting for one of us to die
and that, my love, is most likely madness.
I can handle being left with nothing and with no one; I learned to lose, I learned to exist
like a flower without petals or like an orphan without a dog, and that, my love, is saying
way too much.
Our memories are filled with surprises like inserting a fist in a mouth, reaching the heart,
pulling with force and aborting the child we don’t want and that, my love, is a monstrous
reaction and also the most tender promise we uttered on this Earth.
III
Forgetting is a perfect verb. Forgetting
is protecting memory from pain and hate.
Forgetting the face of a farewell, the nuances of the eyes,
the gestures of a storm that won’t break.
Forgetting prevents the heart from falling into loneliness and doubt.
IV
If I forget you, don’t get offended. Just remind me of your name and where we met.
If I forget you, it’s because I struggle against forgetfulness and I forget that I shouldn’t
forget.
If I forget you in the middle of a conversation it’s because I’m trying to remember a
poem.
If I forget you it’s because I am living inside myself.
If I forget you, forgive me, I was thinking about you.
If I forget you when you are walking at my side it’s because I was distracted by the feline
face of a sunflower in a window.
If I forget you it’s related to birds of prey.
If I forget you, touch me. Bring me back to myself. It’s possible I am tasting the tin of
my blood.
If I forget you, forgive me, I was thinking of you.
V
Forgetting is a perfect verb. Forgetting
that my lips touched your lips,
sleeping lips, lips that throb on the mirror’s surface.
My reflection in the borders of your kiss. My tongue,
the torrent that spools around your feet.
Why don’t you, my illustrious beast, polish the ray of light around my neck?
Or did you forget my favorite pain? It still hurts here,
in the pain of my pain.
The abyss has frozen over
but this good girl has learned her lesson. Now, I carry a fistfull of master keys,
I’ve built a personal cemetery, I’ve become an expert at beheading.
In a drawer inside my chest I hold all the names and a thin fillet of love.
When you return, the membrane of my forgetting will be the only thing that remains.
Krisma Mancia (San Salvador, 1980) studied literature at the University of El Salvador and participated in the Taller de Talentos workshop of the Casa del Escritor. Her work has been published in various anthologies, journals, and magazines. She has participated in national and international festivals, conferences and literary readings. Krisma is the winner of the International Young Poets Prize La Garúa 2005. She is author of La Era del Llanto (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impreso, 2004), Viaje al Imperio de las Ventanas Cerradas (Editorial La Garúa, 2006), Nueva Cosecha (Editorial Casa de Poesía, Costa Rica, 2016), Pájaros Imaginarios y Trenes Invisibles Entre Tu Ciudad y La Mía (Editorial Valparaíso, 2016).
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran American author, editor, and translator. She is the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2022); the chapbook Piedra (La Chifurnia, 2022); and the poetry collection, Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). She is the translator of Family or Oblivion by Elena Salamanca, Prewar by Tania Pleitez, and Efímero by heidi restrepo rhodes. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
