issue 31: monsoon 2025

JEANNETTE LOZANO CLARIOND

Even Time Bleeds

Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander

From Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems, forthcoming in 2026 from Princeton University Press


from Ammonites

from Section One

*

Intolerable the world if it could not be thought. 

*

Poetry is exile, to the origin.

*

More important than creation, the coming to terms with creation. 

*

Pilgrimage as lived place, its lantern.

*

The slow rhythms of light mobilize the root. 

*

Discovery, the invention of the lived. 

*

Even late, the word determines the dole.

*

A shadow, minus its limits, would burn off.

*

Out of empathy, placing the pot in a more scenic spot. 

*

In absolute darkness, she still feels the star’s blaze.

*

It’s the wound that ferries us to shore. 

*

Listening to the limit, then recognizing yourself in it. 

*

I succeeded in making your absence my residence.

 

 

from Blindness, Where You Find Yourself

Homelessness

No, it wasn't the winter with an ice sword

held up in its weary arm.

It wasn’t the stubborn rain flooding the crops

or the shearwaters at the ridge.

It wasn’t even those thick clouds sipping at the eaves. No.

It was me, me with my habitual absence,

abandoning the nest in the storm.

 

 

Passage


A perfectly delineated

line, the horizon;

grayish,

the figure of a man

vanishes until red

and yellow brushstrokes

give him depth and density. 

Reality is something that doesn’t

happen; living is something 

else. The dark

clarity of a tree.

 

 

from The Core of the Calyx



Your face lit by candlelight,

the mist of your lips,

and your almost transparent body

down there in that pit

of torn roots.

A trace of your scent

lingers near the tree.

Come morning,

the wind will reverse itself. 

Your absence burns through me.

 

Jeannette Lozano Clariond is a poet, translator, and founder of the Vaso Roto Editions in Spain and Mexico. Along with the Gonzalo Rojas National Poetry Prize, Jeannette L. Clariond has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; the Arts Award from the University of Nuevo León; the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize; the Best Translation Award for her book collaboration with Harold Bloom: The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary American Poetry; the Juan de Mairena Award from the University of Guadalajara; the International Latino Best Book Award for her translation of Anne Carson's Decreation; the San Juan de la Cruz International Poetry Prize; the Pilar Fernández Labrador International Poetry Prize of Salamanca; and the BIBLOS Award for Merit.

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His most recent books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem and Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.