mere air, these words

The day Adrienne Rich died, the Patagonian sun burned high
over where I was, and girls with their shoulders bared pranced
around boys in black hoodies who, in between flip tricks  

Kissed their open mouths, tongues extended like giraffes,
legs almost as scrawny. I thought a lot about the word
“mestiza” that day. I thought about late 19^th century photographs

Of towering Tehuelche women and the pale-faced Argentine men
who finally conquered the unyielding south three hundred years
after Magellan’s men had made contact and hurriedly left.

The archetype, born. Woman sits on plaza steps or a windswept rock;
she redoes her ponytail or sharpens a spear point; she turns her cheek
and speaks to the woman next to her, and in secret she waits, even if it takes

Three hundred years. But then I wondered about a country where abortion
is illegal but whose president rules with a hand more insoluble than Churchill’s, 
and Evita’s fame, though more than being, too, a woman.

I wondered if it was possible to love something as durable and permeable
as we so often are – and in the graffitied shadow of Spanish general’s statue,
back bent and head lowered in iron-cast tiredness, I extended myself,

Arms and lungs and all, in defense of those who,
in truth, didn’t need it.

(Source: aseaofquotes)

Onda Verde

Suzanne Highland

Let’s talk about the carros for a minute.
You’ve never seen
so many. You’d think there was a plan,
like God predetermined
the movements, the way they all seem
to speak without talking.
Yet predestination and clusterfuck
are close cousins, good friends,
and there are just as many dogs as humans
and twice as many cats
as dogs. So you start asking yourself if
maybe, maybe it’s easier
to make a home in a place full of them, or
maybe it’s harder then.
The pigeons are as big as babies and the trains
fly right over the playground.
If there’s a plan, no one follows it. The news
talks about a collision in Flores
and there’s an angel on the crosswalk on your
way home, and a warning, and a
question. And against someone else’s skin,
you answer it. Let’s talk about
the cars for a minute, you say. Remind
me which bus to take home.

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

(Source: thediaphanous)