I
I only know that old
stars, collapsed by sun
rays, were always
here
II
A procession of planetary bodies
is a comet without a name
A long line of satellites
capture waves
that arrive
in your hands
through vibrations
woven into webs
III
It doesn’t matter that there’s a little wind
when Venus and Aquarius reunite with Jupiter
Today the wind blows
toward the ruins of the solar station
IV
Thanks to orbital chance
a meteorite that has wandered
for thousands of years, sometimes
lands—
differentiated matter,
a protoplanet
as old as a galaxy
Macarena Urzúa Opazo (Santiago, Chile, 1978)is a Researcher and Associate Professor at the Department of Literature and Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities at Universidad de Santiago, Santiago, Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. She has published articles regarding post dictatorship poetry in Chile, chronicles and cinema from the perspective of memory, space and landscape and on Avant-Garde networks’ conformation in Latin America. She has been a Visiting Professor at Williams College, MA, and at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She has held a Getty Library Research Grant (2016), a DAAD Grant for Research Stays for Academics at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin (2019). As a poet she has had her poetry translated into English and published in Parmenar Press Online Magazine (UK) and into French in Revue Fracas. She has been organizer of the International Po Ex Conference (Santiago, January 2019 / 2023/ 2025: México), and also has been one of the authors and translators for the Bilingual Anthology Po-Ex (2018).
Emilia Phillips (they/them) is the author of five poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including Nonbinary Bird of Paradise (2024) and Embouchure (2021), and four chapbooks. Their poetry, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared widely. They are an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English; MFA in Writing Program; and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNC Greensboro. Dictionary of Stars and Comets by Macarena Urzúa Opaza is their first full-length translation.