TE19 Iberian Adventure

Yolanda Castaño

THINGS THAT BEGIN WITH Y

That nostalgia, violets, a signature so far from our tongue, on tour, Armenia, foreign signs, the plump covering of my sensation. A non-existent land, the seventieth rare earth, vast expanses with the minimum space for coupling. All the man in me, Victim and executioner embraced by the same tongue, horizons we launch ourselves at: the sea, Portugal, Spain. The unworkable Tao, cages taken wing in the seventies, the red on the screens, chrome metallic. That point in your life when you don’t know what’s next, The violation of my name, the last thing I write to you. Youth running between our fingers in different directions. When we open the bathroom door of poetry we find the father become a rock. The mere chance that South could be a yoke yo-lan-da-cas-ta-ño repeated till it means nothing. According to some ciphers, my inevitable number, the in-sync brood of a craven island. at times you, and I others, I have no nine-letter word. three equal lines dreaming a covenant, the black memory of that awful nation.

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