The Ward For Broken Women

At first poems
are somewhat bipolar.
Then they make a pact
and save themselves
and they are read.
In the end sometimes poems
have red hands,
a lump for every eye,
serosity in their throat.
Women condemned
to a gulag of clinical analysis.
The moon is white and the one who sees it is crippled.
Universal, the moon in the window
of the healthy, of those who
grow up
without having to look at it.
I have always known this:
it is easy to write
about missing eyebrows,
about severe gowns
the catheter in a vein,
a pasty mouth—
the cast of a kiss.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“The Ward For Broken Women” is from La tierra nos agobia [The Earth Drowns Us] (Pre-Textos, 2011); this English translation first appeared in Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.

You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.