Your lips pulse in the red and fluctuating flame. Your lips and that hard firewood
that seems to turn in space. Everything is quiet and magnificent: the fluid
daybreak, your smooth breast.
Someone escapes by chewing their guilt, throwing their illusions to the dogs.
Your lips move, dance to the rhythm of the capricious comings and goings of the fire
of the world.
I love the wind, the burning of summer.
Leña y fuego
—a Luis Yadarola
Tus labios palpitan en la roja y fluctuante llama. Tus labios y esa dura leña que gira en el espacio. Todo
es manso y soberbio: el terso amanecer, el suave seno.
Alguien se salva masticando su culpa y tirando las ilusiones a los perros.
Tus labios se mueven; bailan al ritmo de las caprichosas idas y venidas del fuego del mundo. Amo el viento y el ardor del verano.
Julia Leverone is in St. Louis pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University. Her poems and translations have appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Asymptote, and are forthcoming in Poetry International and Modern Poetry in Translation. She is Poetry Co-Editor for Sakura Review.
Francisco Urondo (1930-1976) was a prolific Argentine poet, intellectual, and activist. Urondo pushed literary conventions to give way to a conversational, frank style of writing that witnessed and accused, demanded acknowledgement and memory, and fought against the silence and the turmoil in his country. He was assassinated by the Argentine state.