American Bestiary

American Bestiary
Diego Maenza

Urban myths and legends from all over America are condensed in this collection. Through its pages various spectra pass, as the Chupacabra invokes and enumerates in one of the poems: “Creatures of the night and the sun. Covered Lady, Muqui, Yasy Yeteré, Alligator Man, Kharisiri, Whistler, Widow, Telesita, Curupira, Tata Elf, Cadejo, Just Judge of the Night, Witch Monkey, Holy Death, Demon of Dover, Wendigo, Girl with a scarf, The Crying Girl. Creatures of the underworld, let us unite in this new era in which humanity has degenerated and is the scum of the universe”.

Diego Maenza

American Bestiary

AMERICAN BESTIARY

DIEGO MAENZA

Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres

www.traduzionelibri.it

www.diegomaenza.com

© Diego Maenza, 2018

© Tektime, 2020

© Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres, 2020

Cover illustrations and interior of public domain

www.traduzionelibri.it

www.diegomaenza.com

AMERICAN BESTIARY

DIEGO MAENZA

Translated by Gastón Jofre Torres

SOUTH AMERICA

THE COVERED LADY

(Romantic quintet of a beheaded Ecuadorian)

Nupcial poison in
the death rattle of drunkenness.
You howl the pain that escapes from your pores
when you unmask your teeth
and you feel the caress of Tánatos.

Rain of spilled dark prisms.
Rotten vulva that numbs the fellatio.
Who kissed you attest your fragrance,
but the ones you touched are dead;
ergo, I have spoken with death.

Narrow alleys revere you,
mother of darkness, wife of sleep,
sulfur lover, friend of the anthracite.
The magnolia expels sweat from your uterus:
breaks Ecuadorian avenues like carrion.

You distract the young man and the old man in the same way.
Your philosophical postulates: sex and revenge.
Who saw you legitimize your beauty,
but now they are clergymen or they are in the asylums;
ergo, I've talked to the harlots.

One night, drunk with love, I caught up with you.
I found you black as silicon
and I was pale as a pond
that will reflect the moon of your sex.
Suicide is the purest form of love.

THE MUQUI

(Human poem of a Peruvian miner)

I belong to the mines.
At dawn everything ends and everything begins.
The corollary of cripples is a song of pain.
I chew a coca leaf while I masturbate
ruminating on the paralysis of materialism.

I am elusive even though my cousins are gregarious
and circulate through the streams like a swarm of hilarity.
I have decoded their Quipus and passions,
I have studied gold and man.

I belong to the water
that even washes the darkest corners:
a miner goes by with his stinky armpits,
it crashes its head against a very black stone.
How to talk after the categorical closure
if her children, young men and nymphs have not eaten?

I do not have a neck: how to explain existentialism?
They shiver: shout coldness; they scream: they eat hunger.
I wear my poncho: how to believe in the God of the Sun if he leaves us?
Like mosses: how to trust Huiracocha if there is no corn?
I wear a hat: how to move forward if they exchange our ideas?