Three Poems

translated by Katherine M. Hedeen ・ Olivia Lott
originally by Raúl Gómez Jattin

Jump to: The Last Shot in the Milky Way ・ Not One Sweet Night ・ Lola Jattin

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Death

The Last Shot in the Milky Way

In my deep masturbation sky
you’re the space of unbreakable insatiable desire
Devoured tender tireless by your sex
even if you have no idea Your body lives in mine
It’s as much mine as it could never be out there
in the real world It’s mine when I want you
In the same endless unreachable way
this book is yours The way I am yours

We live in the eight Dual infinity
of two universes Circle 8
Like two twin stars
Two eyes Two asses close
Two testicles kissing

When you get to my sky I’m naked
and you like to rest on
the pillars of my legs
My middle dazes with its force its erect flower
and my cave carnal gnostic like Plato’s
Here you slip away toward the other life

In this sky you give into what you really
are Kiss aggression Sword clashing
Gasp smashing like the sea against my chest
Madness in your Eastern eyes brightens
the orgasm daybreak while your hands
keep hold of me And you tell me
what I want and breathe deep
like you were being born or dying
While semen rivers swell
and flesh shakes and triggers its pleasure
toward the last shot in the Milky Way

On our sky sheets there are clouds
scent of underarm and soft residues
of love On the pillow your head’s left
a hollow that smells like jasmine
And in my body and soul the deep sorrow
of knowing you despise my love

Only for you was my life reborn
in death’s glow

Not One Sweet Night

Read the original here

This fevered love tortuous This waiting
for the moon amid coconut palms Just in case she’d
bring me signs of your body But nothing
But I was too sick to stand
the closeness of your touch You would’ve known
nothing in me but the poet tremble and his death

This fear of eye contact it wasn’t in vain
You were covered in another world Far off
Mostly when I loved you When I was
yours like a cloud mirrored in water
Inside but distant Within the womb
of a made-up reality gone just like that

Wholly beautiful because I left your body
untouched though we didn’t want it that way
But before my desire came my future
You before my desire for you
before desire came love
Before love came life and its wickedness

This love never had a single night
Not one sweet night my love

Lola Jattin

Read the original here

For Alejandro Obregón

Beyond the night twinkling in my childhood
Beyond even my first memory
is Lola—my mother—facing a wardrobe
powdering her face and fixing her hair
She’s already made it thirty years beautiful and strong
and she’s in love with Joaquín Pablo—my old man—
She doesn’t know I’m hiding in her womb for whenever
the strength of her own life needs mine
Beyond these tears running down my face
her immense sorrow like a stab wound
is Lola—dead—still vibrant and living
sitting on a balcony to watch the stars
when the swamp breeze messes up
her hair and she combs it once again
with some sort of concerted laziness and pleasure
Beyond this instant gone and it won’t be back
I’m hidden in the flow of a time
that takes me far away and now I can sense it
Beyond this verse that’s killing me in secret
is old age—death—everlasting time
when both memories: my mother’s and mine
are just a lonesome memory: this verse

Raúl Gómez Jattin (Cartagena, 1945-1997) was one of Colombia’s most outstanding poets—and one of the country’s most controversial literary figures. He spent most of his adult life between psychiatric hospitals, jails, and living as a homeless person. Through it all, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly-famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. As a queer man of Syrian descent writing in a way that broke with his country’s tradition, his rightful place at the forefront of Colombian poetry has long been denied. In 1997, he was tragically killed by a bus. Almost Obscene is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. Her latest translations include collections by Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Fina García Marruz, and Raúl Gómez Jattin. She is the co-editor, with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding, of the groundbreaking transatlantic translation anthology, Poetry’s Geographies (Eulalia / Shearsman 2022). She is an editor of Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

Olivia Lott is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. In 2024-25, she will join Yale University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is a scholar of Latin American and hemispheric poetry and poetics, translation, avant-garde networks, and the 1960s and 1970s. Her scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Translation Studies, and Chasqui. She is the translator or co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry into English.