print previewback ANIS SHIVANI
Translations from Lorca
1 Farewell
If I die the internet buzzes on.
A little boy shaving his cute moustache,
fingers of ice cream,
trailing vapors of dissonance
behind the already-dead mother
laced in gunpowder.
2 Suicide
The girl and her paltry bathtub.
The stigmata of science fiction roses.
A garrulous morning outside the
hedonist balcony, facing the glass
tower of silence. How many
wires of torture run through this
gay workers’ paradise?
3 Narcissus
You came to my banquet a flabby boy.
I jittered obese skin from zero to zero.
Boy, give me your death rays,
your video coronations, your stalactites
of corn and cocaine and cadence.
You speak like a Brooklyn sodomite.
A naked palm tree hallucinates
your next moment of death.
4 In Another Mode
We walk across the dynamite bridge.
The business school has a face of indigestion.
You wonder about the organs of my name.
I am on my death-spiel about bureaucrats.
Some think airports are paradises.
I touch your rose skin with my name,
before the mullahs rise for prayers.
5 Desire of a Statue
To be looked at on rainy afternoons
beside the halls of Iron Curtain greatness
like a redeemed possibility, bride
to gestures, twice the ordinariness
of supermarket shopping, hollow eyes
tracing the signifier settling down,
sighing, giving up torture,
compromising for food or drink. 
