Virgil Suarez
The Patagonies/Las Pentagonias of Reinaldo Arenas
How many times did you, Reinaldo, were forced
to eat your own words? Pieces of paper torn
from your journal, your entrails, feathers in your
mouth, rock-hard fists in your stomach. Each
time you spat fire back at those bastards. Five
times they took your novel, found it where you hid
it, burned it as though in fire your memory would
fail you, would not redeem you, and each time,
again, you wrote the words, breathed them back
from the ashes of their violence and cruelty, and you
wrote them down time and again, these bright embers
ablaze on the vastness of your spirit, tu espiritu bello.
And in the end, your words glow, these beacons
of gorgeous, hypnotic light that exiles pray to, follow
to arrive home through the distant fires of their own
lives - five novels of wind, earth, water. What gives
in this land of vast possibility? What brings memory
into the fold of an embrace? Your eyes opening, free.
Page(s) 58
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The