PACT

(After Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series)

I will carve my shape into your rock

and you will multiply my shadows.

I will serrate you with my small seismic frame.

You will listen from inside your many-seeded gourd.

I will scorch you with the flames of my peripheries.

Onto your belly, I will heap calla lily and alyssum.

You, earth, will cuff me to your gravelly consonants.

This is the only way you know to love.

I will smear you with lard, feathers,

and the blood of fowls.

No giggling bangles and jiggling ass cheeks.

No nostril flare and gold-throated crown.

Sunken into the earth, I am pelt and pudendum.

I am bone of groin and burial mound.

I will cast my outrage into your dust, strike

my grave into your stone again and again.

Show me how expanse swallows shadow.

Break me into the archeology of rescue.

Cover me with your layers of magma and mantle.

I will thunder beneath the fawn’s hoof.

PACTO

(Inspirado en “Silueta Series” de Ana Mendieta)

En tu roca tallaré mi contorno

y multiplicarás mis sombras.

Te cercenaré con mis plaquitas tectónicas.

Me escucharás desde tu corteza semillera.

Te abrasaré con las llamas de mi periferia,

En tu vientre acumularé violetas y alcatraces.

Tú, tierra, me esposarás a tus ásperas consonantes.

Es la única manera que sabes amar.

Te untaré manteca, plumas

y sangre de gallinas.

A ras de la tierra, soy cuero y vulva.

Soy hueso de la ingle y montículo mortuorio.

No habrá tintineo de brazaletes ni meneo de nalgas.

Ni destello de fosas nasales ni gargantas coronadas.

Mi furia se conjurará en tu polvo, mi tumba

golpeará tu roca una y otra vez.

Muéstrame la extensión que engulle la sombra.

Introdúceme en la arqueología del rescate.

Cúbreme con tus capas de magma y manto.

Retumbaré por debajo de la pezuña del ciervo.

© All rights reserved Mia Leonin (versión al español Omar Villasana)

Mia Leonin is the author of two books of poetry, Braid and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press), and the memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, two Florida Individual Artist Fellowships, and her poetry and creative nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Leonin’s poetry has been published in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She frequently writes about Spanish-language theater for the Miami Herald. Leonin creative writing at the University of Miami. www.mialeonin.com