Palimpsest

“Esto es un gallo.” – Orbaneja

This is a rooster. Have
some low-shelf wine.
Check the roster of your
heroes: have they fine
linens, tall horses, helmets
with unsmudging shine?
Or cardboard hats and mixing
bowls? And look, they did fine.
This is a rooster. Grab your marbles.
Cast pearls before the swine.

ξ

Vallejo 

These are cymbals for broad avenues,
outside, alongside, in between.
These are castanets, tambourines, these
are jingle bells. They simmer soft
in twenty apices, then return,
piano piano, to the fore. There,
they clatter happy. Thoracic.
They sing quiet in the shoes.
They go deeper, they break often.
They call the heart, the blues, the news.

ξ

Zachary Rockwell Ludington is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Maine. His research focuses on the poetry of Spain’s historical avant-garde. A poet and translator as well as a scholar and teacher, his creative work has appeared in magazines and journals like LEVELER, Drunken Boat, Bateau, and Numéro Cinq. Cardboard House Press recently published his translation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh, a project which won a grant from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.