Uruguayan Short Story
My mother knows her sonnet by heart
and remembers a few lines from Macbeth.
From her I got my love of books
and animals. At my age she was married,
had inspired some elegant poetry.
In childbirth she cried out for a woman
who had been dead twenty years.
In the small hours’ watery silence
my father is awake to the old feuds
to be cut by a stroke of his pen -
a flawless justice that people
will wear like some ill-fitting coat.
Truth is a dead load on his brain
and dreams have become burdensome.
It goes on. I loved someone once
who loved horse races and horses:
for years I scoured the paper’s
turf page for interesting names.
He left my poems on the back seat
of his car, where they wept unheeded.
And bright air is shifting around me
while my feet try to bite into this
city that will not be conquered:
supple streets filled with wide light,
dark veins throbbing with long misery.
Page(s) 54
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