POEMS

THE BARTERING

A man lifts a blue leather volume of Simone Weil from ‘53, brushes off a film of dirt. “Buried,” the vendor says, “in a yard with those other leather ones. Two kids brought them in a wheelbarrow.” The man nods—it is a common story eleven years after Pinochet: the unearthing of a book buried in fear and found in a yard or basement and sold swiftly like the furniture of the dead. 

“I’ll give you 500 pesos for it,” he offers the vendor, the cost of an ice cream, a small box of mints. 

He resists pressing the cover back, thinking of his own edition of La Necesidad de Raices, the night his daughter burned the book in a firepit an hour before soldiers searched the house. The moment they entered, he smelled it—the smoke still in her hair.

SECOND SNOW

If it’s a natural death, you said,
let it be fast—un ataque 

de corazón. You’d always 
wanted dual passports, and to die 

from anything but cancer, the castle 
slowly devouring its own rooms 

and walls. Every winter we return 
to these questions of threshold

and dignity; whose country 
is the more forgiving, as we sink 

into another year of marriage. 
The first walk brisk enough 

to see our breath, we begin again
the discussion of endings, 

then of children, as if they were the same 
plaintive wish. Here, my love, 

your thickest scarf, your hat.