POEM TO BE READ IN A BAR SOUTH OF THE CITY
by Josué Andrés Moz / trans. willy palomo

For Alberto López Serrano, Erick Arevalo,
Jorge Lopez, Fredy Tato Mejía y Jose Aguilar C
Because you each have a true reason to love the night.

Close the bottle over your eyes
its hot bright eyelid.

We forgot how to love without waiting for the certainty of statistics,
we understood that the dream had been denied to those who wanted to forget the answers.

For years now
it is time to cry our most bitter laughter.

To open the window is to find yourself with all the doors closed.

Between us
the breath of rubble,
the empty eye that echoes the roulette’s uneasy spin,
the needles in watches and arms,
the timid truces of insects,
the yellow snow dripping in the lungs.

No one here is any different than a burnt-out star.

We are all the same repetitive three-minute-and-a-half song
whose lines never dampen anything between the legs
but can tell you about rotten flags in their eyes.

Brick by brick the signs make sense,
in these walls where innocence is the antithesis of darkness,
where one key is enough to open all doors,
where the night lasts as long as our two-faced sorrow permits.