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.