Sierra DeMulder
Poeta de Estados Unidos, dos veces campeona del Nacional de Poesía, y autora de tres poemarios:
The Bones Below, New Shoes on a Dead Horse (2010, 2012, Write Bloody Publishing), and We Slept Here (Button Poetry, 2015).
Receptora de na beca McKnight en 2014, el trabajo de Sierra DeMulder ha sido presentado en NPR, Huffington Post, The Advocate, y más. Además de perfomances, Sierra DeMulder es la directora del programa de estudios Slam Camp en la Universidad de Indiana, un campamento anual de verano de escritura para estudiantes de secundaria, y una de las fundadoras de Button Poetry, el distribuidor digital más grande de la palabra hablada en el mundo.
Su última colección de larga duración, Today Means Amen, fue lanzada a principios del 2016 por Andrews McMeel, editor de Calvin y Hobbes, The Oatmeal, y el New York Times bestseller poeta Lang Leav.
Sierra DeMulder vive en Minneapolis con su perro, Fidelis.
de “New Shoes on a Dead Horse” (2012).
El Genio Diserta sobre el Suicidio
Grabar tu nombre en el trofeo de la soga
y la distancia con el piso. Escupirle brillo para la eternidad.
Convertirte no en la razón por la que tu padre toma, sino en la
que lo lleva en un carruaje de temblores
a tomar nuevamente. Registrarte en el circo
de obituarios: Pasen a ver a los mágicos, a los
que hacen lo que otros no pueden.
Vean al Tragador Exhausto.
El Acróbata Colgado. La Sirena de Aletas Azules
que flota boca abajo en un tanque
con branquias en sus muñecas. Mirar y ser mirado
por siempre. La palabra no dicha. El sueño
olvidado. El poema que ella
escribirá siempre y no terminará nunca.
(Traducción por Alejandro Rodríguez Morales)
The Genius Discusses Suicide
To carve your name onto the trophy of the noose
and the floorless. To spit-shine it for eternity.
To become not why your father drinks, but what
carries him on a chariot of tremors
to drink again. To sign up for the obituary
circus: Come see the magical, the ones
who do what other cannot.
See the Exhaust Swallower.
The Dangling Acrobat. The Blue-Finned Mermaid
who floats face down in a tank
with gills on her wrists. To stare and be stared at
forever. The unsaid word. The forgotten
dream. The poem she will
always write and never finish.
Your Son Has a Beautiful Voice
Once, outside of an ice cream shop,
he told me how you got sick.
How he was ten years old and how
he used to fall asleep in the backseat
during the long drive up north
to the better hospital. How he knew
the end was near because that week,
the preacher spoke of how God giveth
and especially of how God taketh away.
How he woke up in the middle of that night,
in the middle of a dream, and walked into
your room. How you passed right then,
as if waiting for his permission to teach him
all that you could about life. How the crying
seemed to go on forever. How suddenly,
one day, it stopped and he has not
cried since. I fall asleep beside him now,
The Perm
The first time my mother stood up
to my father, she got her hair permed.
He had told her not to, said it was
a waste of my hard-earned money.
My father tells me this story while crying.
He is softer now, a treadless tire.
My mother came home from the salon,
and I’ll be damned, if it didn’t look terrible.
It killed me, Sierra, I swear to God.
The perm, this first mutter
in a soundless room, the first swing of the bat
only to find the pinata is a real dog. My mother
cried for hours, didn’t speak for a week.
Now, thirty years later, I am a poet
and I am telling this story as if it were mine.
I am harvesting this splinter.
This embarrassing toothache.
I am making my father drag his temper out of storage
by the wrist. I am making my mother drive home
from the salon over and over and over.
Baptism
The twins who found the dead body in the river
stopped coming to school for the last weeks of 5th grade.
We rode our bicycles to the pay phone,
dialed their number, swore we smelled their father’s
cigar smoke through the receiver. They never came out. By July,
they became a ghost story we told the younger children;
how the river swallowed their voices, dulled
their eyes into two dry stones. All summer,
we swam in pools, reveled in the clear chlorine.
The twins returned for the first day of sixth grade
as if back from the dead. Their breasts had unwrapped
themselves from under their skin. Their legs: no longer
childish planks. We tried not to stare, to whisper.
They sat alone at lunch and we gossiped of what happens to girls
who looked like women. That night, one by one,
we snuck out of our homes, unplanned, to swim naked
in the river, to baptize the closed rosebuds of our nipples,
to float amongst corpses, to drown the child in us.
Best Man
Inevitably, my father will cry at my wedding.
He will be dressed in his only suit coat
which he wears as naturally as a cardboard box.
His jeans, his tie mechanically hung like tinsel.
Not one for formal events, he tends to shift
in his seat, impatient as a hand saw.
When he cries, and he always cries,
the way only a father of three women does,
his chest is a tired buoy. It sighs and rises
and everything in his face sinks
as if someone tossed a rock into the pond
and the ripples expand forever and it
is the most beautiful drowning.
.