from Garlic Soup and Mezcal

Florencia Walfisch



When the world was big
like the antechamber of an empty world without wings or valleys
without regions of earth and without air in the heart and eyes
without your voice splitting my body like a desperate sign of life

in my life when I used to get drunk drowning my mature heart and my

two tits
firm witnesses of your darkness scattering
in a time without duration without regions and without air

when the world was a big antechamber of the world
and your voice opened a space between me as between me and the only
possible place however
uncertain.


*



She crosses a plaza. a man devours her feet and chokes. she screams out like a man in the middle of the dark. now she can't move except in her thoughts. the music sounds like midnight and rain. her crotch fills with suns, in a figurative sense. in a strict sense, it's wet. her heart feeds on recounting profane things. they tell her to make a straight black skirt. she imagines that in the creases of what's missing something remains. in her hands an empty suitcase. it's immense with youth and that's how it's aged. she crosses a plaza. her heart spills white blood. the wind brushes against the wet from before. his lips scream out when the night arrives. four men say you are fire, you are made of fire. it's not raining in oaxaca.


*



She saves the geography of her memory for another hour. a body travels in the subterranean time of words. always time drains away when she writes for someone. she draws a man barefoot, a woman barefoot; some naked shoes. her other voices collide with someone else's ascent. there is no image in the traveling image. it's the duration of a person in her own person. it's a voice that shifts to say now me.


*



I paint, on the white surface I trace the decomposition of absence. a color like

a giant ocean where I put to rest the necessity of what I ignore. I wake up in faraway place where I'm still a prisoner of dreams. I distill what works for me in the night, what works in me, with me. with the memory of what I'm attempting. on the white surface I trace the decomposition of absence.


*



Bit by bit the sun defines shadows. invisible thread of what wakes and the absence returns to her skin as if lasting. the slow, certain march to the middle. after, imperceptible, the decline of the day returning. the interior laughs at her shadowy identity. the interior laughs with so much complicity. after the darkness is the illusion of a flood. of dissolution. a body that thinks of its solid identity and turns into a seed. the seed pushing on its horizon until it sprouts. it sprouts until screaming, abysmal in the sound, it breaks. the wound reorganizing itself as offspring until flooding. (the flooding breaks all the edges of the sea).


translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the poems read in the original Spanish by the author:

In her essay "The Anti-Anaesthetic," Erín Moure writes: "It's materiality that interests me in writing poetry: words and the force of words . . . as well as the relation between the parts of particles, the interrelation of parts in the whole." Poetic structure (as opposed to form, which, as she claims, is a unifying principle, a cultural artifact) breaks down into its materials, moves as they move, shifts accordingly as new particles come into view. In Florencia Walfisch's Sopa de Ajoy de Mezcal, materials (desire, memory, blood, paint) are constantly at play. When they move, structure leaks, bends. Narrative often gives way to an emergent female consciousness that shapes itself into being, responds to what it touches and to how it is touched. In this way, structure becomes inextricable from the body, physical presence, social order. When the poems rupture, change perspective, disrupt their own logic, they not only disrupt a larger system into which they are written, but also place themselves beyond the reach of any one privileged vantage point, any privileged discourse that is, as Moure says, "infinitely absorptive."

I read Florencia Walfisch's poems as being invested in this kind of resistance, in enacting resistance through the materials that live inside the work. The excerpt here—the book is comprised of seventy poems—unfolds from a series of faceted relationships, fissures, cries. What builds is not a structure interested in replicating previous structures, but one built of desire, unafraid to return to uncertainty, "la enorme antesala del mundo [the big antechamber of the world]." The imagination becomes not just a means of pushing back against cellular walls, but a way of resisting what Moure calls "an anaesthesia (non-perception)," the inertia that accompanies the reproduction of discourse in its most expected and oppressive forms. When re-framing issues of gender, trauma, and artistic agency, Sopa re-opens an economy of desire into these discourses, finding potency in the ongoing and the as-yet-realized, in "la memoria de lo que intento [the memory of what I'm attempting]."

Florencia Walfisch was born in Buenos Aires. She writes and makes textile art. She has participated in various individual and group shows, interdisciplinary projects, and poetry readings. With Ana Lafferranderie, she curates the reading series at Fedro, a bookstore and cultural center in San Telmo. Her poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. In 2004, Sopa de Ajo y Mezcal received the Jaime Sabines prize from Coneculta in Chiapas. She lives and works in her hometown.

Alexis Almeida is an assistant editor at Asymptote. Her poems, translations, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in TYPO, Vinyl Poetry, The Volta, Denver Quarterly, Aufgabe, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poems, Half-Shine, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her translation of Florencia Castellano's Propiedades vigiladas is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the recent recipient of a Fulbright grant, and will be traveling to Buenos Aires in the spring.