Schools of horse mackerel come out to greet us,
weigh your lack of sleep and my jitters.
All things considered, they take my side
The landscape is thematic: shellfish that crawl
along the shore, clots of algae,
villages of gulls established on concrete
poles. Closer, only air in broken
shapes and voices.
The cold bites slivers
of grammar, we debate
the interaction of opportunities and water
and isolated opportunities, that is,
we hug each other in the Italian style,
and now the matins bells are ringing
in town, and they’re waiting for us.
To be even clearer, you’ve said, isn’t difficult
if sentences
also make clumsy strokes, free
of expectations but not intention.
Have we snored
a lot?—the one who’s speaking is Mary.
Listen to Andrés Navarro read “Off to the Side” in Spanish
Listen:
Andrés Navarro (b. Valencia, 1973) has a degree in architecture. He has published two books of poems: Fever (Pre-Textos, 2005), which won the VI Premio de Poesía Emilio Prados; and A Panoramic Guest (DVD Ediciones, Barcelona, 2010), which was selected for the XXXVI Premio de Poesía Ciudad de Burgos. He currently writes literary criticism and teaches creative writing at the University of Valencia.
Curtis Bauer has published poems and translations in Fulcrum, The Dirty Goat, The American Poetry Review, The Indiana Review, Circumference, and The Southern Review. He has been a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Prize, The Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Glimmer Train Poetry Open. He won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize for his first poetry collection, Fence Line (BkMk Press, 2004). He teaches creative writing and translation at Texas Tech University and is the publisher of Q Ave Press Chapbooks.
Homepage photograph via Flickr by guy mason
