Articles tagged "Spanish"
To Fly to the Himalayas
(This post is based on Yuyutsu Sharma's 2010 visit to Cordoba where he was invited as a guest poet at the Cosmopoetica Poetry Festival.) My life I can tell you in two words-- a patio and a small…...
Beyond this Darkness and this Silence
The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here. —H. G. Wells I warned her in one of our first conversations, though she didn’t take me seriously:…...
To Troy, Helen
The two lay down together on the bed. Atreus's son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast, searching for…...
Good Women and Bad Women
We never discovered how they found us out. My brother insisted that Márgara had stumbled across them accidentally while she was putting clean sheets on the bed, and that she had squealed on us.…...
A Report from Hell
The so-called "war on drugs" began five years ago. According to official sources, the victims—children, teens, adults, women, men—number roughly 50,000; other sources claim over 60,000 have…...
Violence and Drug-Trafficking in Mexico
In Mexico, people will pay up to $70,000 dollars for a license to hunt and kill a bighorn sheep. Killing a man is much cheaper—about $2,000, according to the rates charged by hitmen in Ciudad Juárez,…...
The Way to Juarez
The doctor didn’t try to hide from me the storm my father was passing through: “It’s called delirium. Hallucinations, amnesia, psychic disorder. It could also be a case of dementia caused…...
The Mystery of the Parakeet, the Rooster, and the Nanny Goat
The Tate Drugs Gallery Inside the Ministry of Defense in Mexico City is a museum that’s not open to the public. It displays all the jewels, weapons, clothing, and reliquaries that have been seized…...
Death Count
In the small hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese ended her shift at the bar as usual, took her car, and parked a few yards from the apartment complex where she lived, in Kew Gardens, Queens.…...
Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm
(Opening Song) Hey, sweetheart, don’t go picnicking in the cemetery: don’t go drinking in the cemetery: don’t go doing drugs in the cemetery: don’t dress and make up like a Goth…...
Tijuana: On the Pozole-Man’s Hill
1 A writer from Tijuana told me: “If you want to know what Tijuana is all about, you have to go there.” There was the village of Ojo de Agua, in a dusty valley on the outskirts of the city,…...
The History of the Present: Sergio González Rodríguez on the Mexican Literary World and the Drug War
Carmen Boullosa: When I approached you for this interview you said you were convinced that the situation in Mexico should not be read as a conflict between “good” and “evil”—criminals…...
The Heart’s Secret Moves
It happened on a Wednesday, this tale of enlightenment. Tuesdays Pedro was The Heart, which meant cracking heads. He was a Lightweight, and a real brawler. Wore a red mask and had a red, triangular kaboom…...
The Politics of Mourning
“Acapulco, September 18 [2010]. Two unidentified men, decapitated in the town of Coyuca de Catalán. Heads thrown into a soft-drink bottling plant from two moving vehicles. One has its eyes…...
Notes on the Violence in Sinaloa, Mexico
For two weeks I sensed violence as an invisible force. I only experienced one act of direct intimidation: a thirty-something, ultra-well-dressed woman with five-centimeter nails adorned with precious stones…...
Sleepless Homeland
… Did we lose you in a game of dice? Did you escape from us in one snort? In which junkie’s syringe did you become trapped, my Homeland? Maybe…...
The Eagle
I only learn to be content. —Shogun Tokugawa For Brisa Tinoco and those who have emailed asking if it’s true an old eagle sits alone on the mountaintop, …...
Holding Pattern
I’m so uneasy with reality that I find planes comfortable. I surrender myself, resigned, to movies I don’t want to see and food I don’t want to eat, as if practicing a disciplined spiritual…...
And If You See That I Don’t Come Back
Look at you, you’re soaked! I’ve been waiting hours for you. Out to buy cigarettes in the middle of all this! We need to talk. What about the cigarettes? Don’t tell me you didn’t…...
The Man Who Buried Himself
It was extraordinary, the change that came over my friend. The jovial, witty, and carefree youth had become a melancholic, taciturn, and cautious man. His moments of abstraction were frequent, and in them…...
There is No Theorem (A Regguetón)
There is no theorem just the combination 10,000 years of going with digressions: I write regguetones, forget the variation. There is no theorem from the mist itself the primates descend in search of phonemes…...
The Other Day After the Rain
I. Once again, the erection. The body’s first signal, heaving me back into reality every time I awake. The Hebrew Kabbalists say that during the night God takes souls on a mystical journey; the privileged…...
Self-Portrait
At one and a half I rolled up the stairs to the second floor. At six I almost drowned in a pool. At seven a current swept me down a river. They hit me with a stick, with a rifle-butt, with a two-by-four.…...
The Crane
Aguardiente comes cheap, meat comes dear (somewhat drunk he tap dances over the wet cobblestones, scoring importance from the conjectured case of fractured bone). “Young man, you have to stay thin,…...
Deus ex Machina
Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has come and it is winter. The trident is cornered, the mountains covered with a skin of ash. Lord, behold light’s song here, your due, in the stillness of the sea…...