A prayer for abandonment

I never released myself
from my loved ones,
I think about abandonment
as an excuse to come back,
so that time can make of the chest
a moor of open hopes.
I think about abandonment
as a night with three suspension points
which opens the windows of grief.
People who loved me
looked at me as if I was a tall house,
three-story high
which they could dessert,
they departed leaving the doors open
because they knew I don’t have
the strength to close them.
I was always the prelude
so they could find love,
I was the place where they concurred crying,
the place where they swaddled their heart,
and when they left,
I, also, wanted to uninhabit my self.

The Television’s statics
settle in the room,
right on the corner where our words join.
I honor the wisdom of your body,
the experience you have gained from your other lovers
to untangle your hair and disentangle your daily clothes.
An angel paralyzes every time you undress,
there’s a thirty degrees sun
raising from your feet
and a moon climbing up your stomach
completing each one of your phases.
You remind me of the woman I dreamt of in my childhood
and you describe your waist which maddens every time someone loves it,
show in my stomach the madness of your pelvis
so the caress will taste like a January’s evening.

You draw a cross in my forehead,
with your fingertips you found
a religion,
You smile
you throw a prayer into the void
to the god in which we do not believe
so that I won’t miss any memory when I get home.
Of those who look at me
none will know I come from your body,
I throw a prayer
so that it will always come back to you.

The foreign girls

With their southamerican denim jeans
and their transnational wonders.
They want to have fun
tracing lines on the shirt
of some mexican with a two hour
variation in their time difference.
They gather around
the wild candies,
between the sheets which cover their fears,
don’t mind the saliva,
they could read the death signs from the lips,
and they engrave the night’s name
in the tarnished glass of their memory.
I don’t talk to them
because I’m afraid of their beauty
but a friend of mine who enjoyed
the sex of one of them,
said it was like crossing the sea,
naked and with the tapping
of an old trained key with a doble function,
entering through the Mexican river of their thighs,
ever since she tasted their love
she calls everything guy and bone,
and now she has the experience
of two continents colliding with each other.
They find a sheet so great
that it frightens every monster,
they talk to long haired men
with heavy beards,
they are alone,
they come home with no pain in their thighs,
with the taste of Tequila in their mouths,
they come back in one piece
survivors still to their boarding house.

Ricardo Plata (Mexico City, b. 1994) studied Hispanic Literature at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. He is author of the poetry collection Para habitar mi nombre under the Literalia publishing label. He was a fellow of the Festival Interfaz: The signs in rotation. He is founder and CEO of Cardenal Literary Magazine and of the National Meeting of Young Writers-UAM-I. He has published in the magazines Círculo de Poesía, Punto de Partida, Buenos Aires Poetry and Mood Magazine. These poems have been translated from Spanishby Daniela Sánchez.