A Peruvian Autumn I Keep Hosted in my Memory Elí Urbina I keep hosted in my memorythe placid image of the body of love.Light must come again,but now, in reality, only the raindrapes the avenue as black birdseed. Look at the slow descent ofmeat’s thorn into the secret wound.The brothel, its greed, absorbs my burnt-out soul,my hope, thirsting of feeling,for an instant, the deaf crackle. In the gloom the prostitute dances with the sinuosity of a broad flare.Already the longing gathers around in the mirror,the shadow of my hand lengthens. As strong as the pleasure burnsalways her face inside me ignites. From The Abyss of Men (2020)Transl. into English: Sofía Leibovich Photo by Leo Arslan Opening an Old Fayad Jamís Notebook on Friday Afternoon Julio Barco In the winter of the summer I describe my eyes, Ithe labyrinthine animal that still dreams opening the notebooksbetween the divided rooms the score of life. Old lovers buy dry bread in the cellars. This poem starts here.Foolish way of repeating the body; This is the poemNothing but a shaky line that isdream verse. As the city sinks into depressionI separate signs and petals. I am the one who watches over your name.I am the one who observes from your window the neighborhoodbarely illuminated by the sunset poles.The most beautiful youngsters are thrown of the Electric Towers.The most beautiful young are launched from the Electric Towers? My long hair is now a fucking form of walk against the wind. Sailor of pampas, land, asphalt, poultry.Girls commit suicide in their roomsYesterday everything was excessively sadEverything will repeat itself or bifurcate the sameIt doesn’t matter: I started another poem and came backthe same: 1. Inert object shakily disposed on the table.2. Street closed as destruction and desire.3. Movement of machines & bodies.4. This poem will begin when everything explodes.5.Our bodies collapse.6. We organize a concert in a body predisposed to joyto correct this. Good. We will walk again.I am the same one who drew centuries ago in your womb A brilliant labyrinth of a thousand Sunflowers.We repeat ourselves in the constellations. My fruit flavor intoxicated your hair. *** A piece of jazz hissing through your body.Everything changes and sprouts and multiplies. The poems we repeat now are emptinessNothingness – a lilac flower.Something mystically recognisablewhen we are absencelooking behind the windows?The beatniks have diedAnd Gary Snyder walksThe lonely mountains.I walk the night.You send your poems to other countries.Reading the poemleads to an understanding of its nature.Nothing personal.My poetic voice mutated in the neighborhoodswhere we prepare lentilsAnd we boiled our sorrowsMy poetic self is bornSad blue lilac full of cloudsThat the celery did not diminishAnd so we love each otherAmbulances roam the cityBetween Oscillations and Digital SemblanceIn forniceOf the silenced bodiesin the only concert that we giveAt the timein the only possible movement.The Concert of our open green clear eyesTo the absolute mysteryTo the burned factories and to the landDid the young people jump from the Electric Tower today?And we are And we runAnd it’s cold in this damn cityThat is my poetic art: our savageHungry,the wind shaking your face.Vague. Way.I’m listening. I observe.I am all this crazy movie whereVerb is beauty and lucidity a bodyLooking for another.I look for you.This way of mine to flee is to pronounce yourName.The clarity of a dinnerwell prepared.Sometimes rooms or versesSometimes Stefan Joyce or Li PoWhile we were cutting a tomatoCool as the diagonal thatruns through my body when I touch yours.When in yours I go back to mineI recognize myself as a void between multiplication and clay.When I hiss your nameIn the mist of hearts.This is my time.Oh streets, I’m so sorry to come backTo live everything againThe poem will be a frozen roomThe poem will be two bodiesThe poem will be some dark images that II gently release betweenThe Axials of Terror and Glory.The poem will be a path through the fire.The poem will be a star.The poem will be a way of feeling abstracted: a state in the crowd.The poem will be the image of a man looking at the glass from a window.The poem will be my hand looking for yours.The poem is an angel about my loneliness.The poem is a lost shoe.The poem is your bodyThe poem is your mouth.The poem is my destinyParty in unrest.Saturday without you.We disappeared in the restless dawnThat you smashed in a canof beer.The body of the poem silently longed forwhen we were two crazy teenagersSeeking to satisfy our abyssesOh Lima take me away from Minor SiltOf the stars multiplied in my PhallusRelatively common sentimental conversationFacing the CenturiesRepeating the maze of the bodyLabyrinth that I silently observed inside myselfWithin others,Within the total Other that is the OrbAnd my mind opening between the cracksOf the days / Smoke from the streets black prayer of the tunaWe will always long for the same poemThat perfectly leads us to ourselvesLabyrinth within Our MusicMusic that croaked within our circumferenceAnd I have rewritten our life:Saturday or Friday night landscapeLooking for love on the long hard streets andAll the asphalt was the lost crevice of your faceWe woke up looking for a ceviche in Puente PiedraI still make love to you as the year closes withSome rum in the room10 lucas is all I have in my bank accountAnd I walk alone &The poem it’s a mind game within our intensityThe poem It is the safe conduct to our temporalityThe poem is the concert of our honestyThe poem it’s the concert of our decadeThe poem it’s your body, Antonio, Mara, streets, Miguel,Ovid, Malaga, Omar, AgamemnonThe poem between roses and glasses clothes and perspirationFrom the fire of colours falling onYour belly: wildfire, beauty, landscape, poem, theoremOf chaos, fire, bodies that I deliciouslyI became my alchemy. EyelidsFrom the crazy city where I dance or play dreamingThis bouquet of wet roses that endedBeing my voice and my body, passion that is chaosIn mind awake where I slideTo know your eyes: what isThe Literary Work? What are your methodsIn the garúa of faces and symbolsIn the semen of infinities, what is reality? Ah, damn summer, you bastardIn the boredom of bitter girlsAnd I decided it embroidered on my hair a longGrimace, a long beat of bitter flowers.The speed of my rhythm. And here we startThis new notebook to protect my eyesOf the folly of a world that is more deplorable every day.And behind were the bodies that I silently lovedAnd behind, my house and the light from the windows, and theTerrible affection that nobody knew how to give. And here,In the showcase of loneliness, among the gardens of boredom,I repeat your body virulently, I longI rise, kiss, lunge, dream, I light up your voiceIntensely the voracity of our bodies.And despair gave me this world that II turned on with the clarity of my mind. And now I do not bathe and I walk alone,Disturbed between streets and hermit smiles.And poetry was something that we tirelessly repeated:Streets, bodies, pieces of a ballad that I placed in your eyes,Insomnia, verses by Borges or Gelman, a balladDe Manzanero while he was looking for the ideal epigraphTo simply show my intensity.Chasing the writing was the verse itself.The verse itself mutates into the plurality of I’s.Perfection is not enough for me, I do not want the absolute.Abstract thinking as an aphorism translated from EnglishTo French, To SpanishThat simply reveals the chaos of a polished mindAs Kavafis thoughtAs I knocked on your door and you opened a quiet pageBy M. Proust. I think we have nothing else left.Except buying old editions of VerásteguiFind a volume of Eminescu to use his versesAs an epigraphWalk, Walk, Breathe, BurnLive it, inhabit it like a strange fire that haunts it.Sing it, cry it, we inhabited the verse like a summerOpen with shorts and fear of going out on the streetsThat was the saddest month.I only want my little room where I dream versesOr streets or landscapes that are necessarily another matter.Another matter to describe the course of your mindInside silently sad computers.And my sadness is miles of versesThat one day I will dream for you whileI miss you between the rooftops and loneliness, lonelinessAnd cats opening black garbage bagsBlack tears of my still raging lonelinessTurned into a little hymn landing on the wingsOf the Lepidoptera. And it’s true, I’m depressedOr sad or with a thousand rebellious sunflowers inside my eyelidsAnd my eyelids are all my crazy mind full of I’sThat, as Julio Herrera points out in metric verse,It is the shuddering Me before the mud of the dough.The Shocked Epoch tenderly overwhelming your sex.And you shine so brilliantly.Oh party, Lima is my crude city and my countryLima is a luminous melody growing happilyand my crude way of walking and watching and scratching my musicTwo young men haunted by hatred searchingA small room to love each other.And yes, I am a boy and I love you, and I will shut up when youNaked and I undress and we are this countryOpen, shattered, cracked like your lips.And that’s why I wrote this poem and started anotherWithin the same axial axis of your mouth.Not this one, pick and choose in thicknessOf meaning the most. And what difference does it make to haveBeen the fire if today we are but twoSilent truths. So far from love I speakSo far from faded feelingsThat I reject my voice from another year, my lonelinessNow written between papers and cutleryAnd this need to walk or stroll quietlyBy rooms. I stared at a flyThat flew above volume two of the WorkComplete by Neruda. And I opened that little book of Fayad, the Cuban, Jamís. Days of getting bored and immediately writing the seizureAnd convulsion is thousands of streets or pains. And all my powerIt is to fix my eyes on you now that you are sobbing betweenYour memories: streets, houses, shattered country, AprilIt’s the most stupid month, you know, you have to workTo pay for the receipts, electricity, streets, songsAnd I also remember that we slept in the eyeOf a newly pregnant mother. Photo by 3Motional Studio Face Walter Velasquez Seeing the glow of your beautyWhat does your beauty contemplateAccompanied by your natureAnd freshness It is your face that amazes meQuiet and distractedLeaving my eyes blindAnd my body turned off Frankly I don’t know if this will be artOh no if it’s art, oh I don’t know if it’s artBut I can’t deny what it isBrighter than everHave been seenOh blazing, oh blazing About the Authors Elí Urbina (b. Chimbote, Perú, 1989) is licensed in Letters and has a Master’s degree in University Teaching and Pedagogic Research. He has published the poetry collections: “La sal de las hienas” – The salt of the hyenas (Plectro Editores, 2017) and “El abismo del hombre”- The abyss of men (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2020). His poetry has been translated into Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, French, Italian and English. He is the founder and director of the poetry magazine Santa Rabia. Julio César Barco Avalos (b. Lima, 1991) is the author of the books Me da pena que la gente grow (Arteidea Editores, 2012), Breathe (La Chimba Editores-2018-Writers Guild Award), Vastísima Architecture (Editora Huachumera-2019-Huauco de Oro Award), Arder (grammar of the dandelions) (Editorial Higuerilla-2019), The music of my head Vol. 7 (Language Peru -Editors) In 2019, he presented Semen (music for young lovers) (Language Peru – Editors). He is the founder and director of the TAJO group. In 2020 he published four books during lockdown: Des(c)ierto (Metaliteratura, Argentina 2020), the re-edition of Semen (Metaliteratura, 2020) and two volumes in Colombia: Operating System (SO, 2020) and Copy, cut, paste, load (Obra Abierta, Colombia, 2020). He is currently Editor of Literalgia and Lima Gris and Manager of the Poético Río Hablador Cultural Project (which develops poetry projects in El Agustino) and directs the website Lenguajeperu.pe, which is a new national blog of Peruvian and Latin American poetry and art. He obtained an honorable mention in the XI Young Poet of Peru contest (2020) with the poetry book Semilla Cósmica. Walter Alexis Velasquez Mendoza is 24 years old. He is a journalism student at the Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University. He has been involved in literary activity since he was twenty years old, where he made his first poetic presentation at the Oral Poetry Slam, at the Reporteros Infiltra2 collective. He has participated in national anthologies such as “El Dolor de la Tinta” (Editorial El Verso Azul); “El Mar No Cesa” (Editorial Ángeles del Papel); “Al Lado del Camino” (Marginal Editions), among others. His writing has appeared in both national and international magazines. Previously, he worked in the Federation of Journalists of Peru, in the Diario La Verdad Municipal and the literary magazine Buensalvaje. He is currently an editor and reporter for the digital portal La Cuarta Noticias. 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