Tatiana Oroño translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Aviso

Hay un hueco en el cuerpo de la mujer a la altura de la cincha del tórax, del abdomen. Se tira de la cama a las cuatro de la mañana porque la noche le da aviso. El hueco no duerme. ¿Cómo va a dormir un hueco?, si falta.

Eso avisa la noche. Como una madre.

Warning

There is a hole in the body of the woman at the height of a girth strap, of the abdomen. She throws herself from the bed at four o'clock in the morning because the night gave her a wake up call. The hole does not sleep. How can it go to sleep, a hole? If it is date already missed.

The night gave that warning. Like a mother.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction and memoir as well as a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia. She is the editor of América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets and a recipient of a  2016 National Endowment Fellow in  Translation.

Tatiana Oroño

Tatiana Oroño (San José, Uruguay, 1947) is the author of seven books including Estuario and La Piedra Nada Sabe. She is the daughter of the well-known Uruguayan visual artist Dumas Oroño and has always written about art in both her prose and poetry. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, and Stand.

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Virginia Lucas translated by Jen Hofer