Construction
Can content be your dinner
dropped down from above?
Go on, break in
This house is ours now.
There’s an artificial distinction
between
catching the ball as it rolls & rolls toward you
and getting rolled right over
Flattened
Try and catch it all
Catch the threads of production
Try and weave
Try and collapse the roof on this thing
The concept of an individual
loaning herself to structure,
a feint that keeps on concretizing
Let’s crumble it up
Grab a bit from the wall
a friable fistful and make yourself a new home
In the exclusion of other possibilities
this will always equal that,
Go on, annihilate the same social history
that would do this to us.
The Word Fire
Start with
a common word-exchange economy
two languages:
one essential, the other immediate,
and map it out from there
Say firs and have an absence of fire
Say language destroys the reality of things with
pure
abstract power
Turn off the hose.
Then replace the real absence with some ideal presence for a change
It’s a step anyway
The words keep disappearing but we can make a
a physique to fill with fixes
Raze the world to make it mean
unspeak the world to make it seen
Detach us from being
so we can go ahead and speak ourselves
The blanks will represent undoing’s undoing.
Rodrigo Rojas Bollo, b. 1971, is a Chilean poet and translator. He is a graduate from NYU’s MfA where he worked with Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Alexander, among other poets. He is the author of two books of essays and four poetry collections, the latest is “Estrella de la mañana” (Garceta ediciones, 2016). His translations into English are available in Barbaric, Vast & Wild (Black Widow Press, 2015); and in journals in the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Peru, Spain and Chile. As a contributing editor to Rattapallax Magazine, from 2003 to 2009, he constantly published poets from South America in translation. He is currently collaborating with visual artists in creative projects and curatorship. Among these projects is the Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo who explores pottery shattering and the language of dreams as a creative practice of resistance. He is also part of the art collective Setebos that develops a transdisciplinary creative practice across Patagonia, and part of the faculty in the Creative Writing program at Diego Portales University, Santiago.