The heartbeat of the poems of Luciana Jazmín Coronado (tr. Allison A. deFreese) comes from the push-pull of beginning- and end-times. “The Beginnning” is a genesis myth refigured for our critical moment. The Christian version has it that the world sprang from God’s command; Coronado imagines a gentler awakening, in which drowsy, new-born man stumbles not only upon apples but coal—twin sins, the seeds of Anthropocene destruction. “Imperfect Children” is suffused with the same ambivalence, a gentle petition to a lowercase god to heal the open wound of existence; “Creation” imagines in the same breath god’s “perfect green lawn” whose plants gird themselves for its coming destruction.
The Beginnning
I.
I was born.
I’ll follow some path,
ask why I bear such sorrow
I ask the sun to step aside because he’s old
and watches everything without remembering.
I love myself with one hand
and explore northward with the other.
I might be inside a flower
or anywhere else.
II.
Try the apples,
taste the flavors of the world.
You will see they are like you:
children demanding a name.
We are here.
We are shadow and sea,
we assemble small fragments of a wallflower
so you will take us in your arms.
Come, we are part of everything,
We like to walk in the cobwebs of the creator’s finger,
to die of laughter and ponder things that swing in the light.
Come, see what we have:
we have discovered the world of coal.
Now open your mouth
And you’ll know what to do with language.
Imperfect Children
Loneliness is the path
piled with things
that shine in the distance.
I’d like to wake at dawn someday
and ask god
to pause movement,
so this endless thread
of imperfect children
can stop bleeding.
Creation
God created a perfect green lawn
where shadows can come and go
and plants grow until they reach the sky
to withstand the final days.
At night, swallows shine
and from the branch tips
chalk children yell,
white as polished rice.
They run around barefoot, beating a stone drum.
Translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese.
Born in Buenos Aires, Luciana Jazmín Coronado has published several highly acclaimed books of poetry: La insolación (Sunstroke, Viajero Insomne, 2014) and Catacumbas (Catacombs, Valparaíso, 2016), winner of the First San Salvador Prize for Hispano-American Poetry (El Salvador). In 2017, she was awarded a creativity grant for young artists and writers through the Fundación Antonio Gala para Jóvenes Creadores (Córdoba, Spain) as well as a residency through la Residencia de Escritores de la UNESCO (Granada, Spain, 2019). Her third book of poems, Los hijos Imperfectos (Imperfect Children), appeared in February 2023). Her first book in translation (a chapbook) won the 2023 C&R Press Winter Soupbowl Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from C&R Press in 2025.
A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow, Allison A. deFreese’s work appears in The Common, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Harvard Review, and World Literature Today. Her recent literary translations include María Negroni’s Elegy for Joseph Cornell (Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020); Verónica González Arredondo’s Green Fires of the Spirits (the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla’s University Press, Libros BUAP, Mexico, 2022), and Carolina Esses’s Winter Season (Entre Ríos Books, 2023). Her translation of Luciana Jazmín Coronado’s previous chapbook, Dinner at Las Heras, was a finalist in Poetry International’s Chapbook Competition and won the 2023 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Contest.
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