Photo by SL Travel Couple

We remember a train, mounds of moss
on its ashen rails.
Train of the past, a ghost that roars and splits
our childhood dreams in two.
In my country, every clatter of a locomotive
was an ominous sound.
But here, you know, I ride the train like straddling
the back of something, with others right behind.
We’re all so close, the trembling of another body
comes into my breath, and I don’t mind
a stranger’s head resting on my shoulder.
We do everything on the train, sleep is the least of it:
make-up, meals, speaking in tongues.
The heat that floats above our heads, that back stretched
over the surface of the world:
that is the animal I’ve been trying to tell you about.

Andrea Cote Botero

Andrea Cote is the author of three poetry collections, En las Praderas del fin del mundo; La Ruina que nombro; Puerto Calcinado; and two selected works, Chinatown a toda hora and Desierto Rumor. She has also published three books of prose: A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti; Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude; and edited a Colombian women’s poets anthology, Pájaros de Sombra, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Cote has received The National Prize of Poetry, Struga International Poetry Prize, and the XXIV Premio Casa de América de Poesía Americana (2024), among others. She has translated into Spanish the poets Gibran Kahlil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith, and Jericho Brown. Cote is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Bilingual M.F.A. at UTEP.

Craig Epplin

Craig Epplin has published reviews, essays, and creative nonfiction in Public Books, Words Without Borders, Music & Literature, The Bosphorus Review of Books, and Guernica, as well as translations of short works by José Martí, César Aira, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at Portland State University, and is the author of the monograph Late Book Culture in Argentina (Bloomsbury).