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61. After Bambi
(Rozas, Boris)
978-1-951370-41-1
In After Bambi, Boris Rozas sketches a poetic cartography of contemporary exposure: borders, violence, precarity, fatherhood, and memory. The poems move through wastelands, prisons, suburbs, and highways where life is sustained in a fragile balance between loss and resistance.
With a restrained, musical voice, Rozas observes and records without concessions. His writing transforms the everyday into poetic matter through a lucid melancholy, free of artifice and attentive to the bodies that inhabit the margins: children, fathers, workers, survivors.
After Bambi neither idealizes nor redeems: it names. A book that looks the present straight in the eye and trusts precise emotion as a form of truth.
Author Boris Rozas
Translation Molly Dunphy Moriel
ISBN 978-1-951370-41-1
Pages 61
Format Paperback
BOWL
I’ve imagined you in the eyelids that dress up the days
over empty bowls
distilling roads to nowhere,
nameless states through which life passes
barely awake
without even combing the monsters that rule on the shore.
The morning is a cavern that looks askance
as it rips out the petals of another calendar,
brushing the cheek of the child
that runs to hide in the wind,
the wind
which is us embarked in the night,
the night
condemning those who serve it without seeking shelter in
another body.
All, herd animals tearing out shoots from the midday sun,
collapsing onto broken pavements that radiate the smell of song,
love ballads for nomad poets
who search through a million knives in the back.
As if it were an ambush,
another categorical yes to whoever waits
and they get another lifetime of advantage.