issue 32: winter 2025
ROXANA CRISÓLOGO
Two Poems
Translated from the Spanish by Kim Jensen and Judith Santopietro
It’s her first day of school
she’s waited so long for Mother to comb her hair polish her shoes
straighten her smock
Mother runs her last bit of spit over the invisible pleats in her skirt
impeccably dressed braids pulled so tight the girl’s eyes
can’t move
neither her eyes nor her imagination can move
no
she is not sick she’s just like this pale
Mother has brought a shine even to the girl’s pale face
She stares at the pelicans afraid their wings will get stuck
in the electrical wires
in the fresh laundry that floats on distant clotheslines
she imagines herself as a pelican trapped inside the ponderous body
inside the little head
inside the enormous nose of a bird that eats crap
She pictures herself smashing the tiny bones of tiny fish that the neighbors
toss to keep her alive
her long beak plunged into the accumulation and wastefulness
of public spending
these are hard times like during the endless National Strike
That’s why she returns to her little girl body on her first day of school
she should lift her gaze from the ground and fly up high
but the braids hold her fastened to her head with a pin
My hand draws a heart on the window
it’s my way of saying goodbye to my daughter
who is going off to find
other ways of speaking her secrets
It’s not enough for you to read my palms she tells me
and I watch how the heart dissolves
into a forest with no windows
her bicycle enters the darkness
a neighborhood of precise lines
defines our separation
Lately birds have been crashing into my window
they’ve gotten used to making blind decisions
frightened by the bloodbath
the neighbors hang all kinds of stuff from their balconies
to deter them
I see the birds die
trying to get to the other side of our eyes
I see them perching on a heap of old clothes
that even the gypsies haven’t noticed
and that the leaves of the trees cover
with the usual hypocrisy of nature
The neighbors insist
if I keep leaving the windows open
more birds will crash
It’s a bad omen they say
I throw the windows open even wider
to remind them that where I come from
separation is defined by even more precise lines
birds also are electrocuted and die
when they try to join one sidewalk to another
Roxana Crisólogo is a renowned Peruvian poet, translator, and cultural worker who was recently selected to participate in the prestigious International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. Her books of poetry include Abajo sobre el cielo, whose Finnish translation was published by Kääntöpiiri, Helsinki, 2001; Animal del camino, Ludy D, Trenes, and Eisbrecher (Icebreaker). Her recent collection Kauneus: la belleza (2021) was republished by Ediciones Nebliplateada, Buenos Aires, 2023 and will appear in Finnish this year. Her book Dónde Dejar Tanto Ruido (2023) was reissued by Gog y Magog Ediciones in 2025. Her latest book Esta canción no termina de salir de mi boca was published by Álbum del Universo Bakterial in 2025. Crisólogo is the founder of Sivuvalo Platform, a multilingual literature association based in Helsinki. Her literary work and projects have been supported by the Finnish foundations, Kone Foundation, Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Kari Mattila Säätiö and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Her works have been translated into Italian, German, Finnish, French, Swedish, and now English.
Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based author, poet, professor, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind (finalist for Forward Magazine book of the year) and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters (Syracuse University Press). She was a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards, Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Prize, the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, the New American Press Poetry Prize and the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize. Active in transnational peace and social justice movements for decades, Kim’s work has been featured in many publications, including, Gulf Coast, MQR, Boulevard, Lana Turner, Modern Poetry in Translation, Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, Extraordinary Rendition: Writers Speak Out on Palestine, Gaza Unsilenced, Bomb Magazine, and many others. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction.