SIERRA DEMULDER [18.536]

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.

.