“Cuerpos”: Five Spanish Poems [by Kiely Sweatt]

 Kiely Sweatt, spending the year in Barcelona,
has been writing poems in Spanish and then translating them into English, an
experience she characterizes as adventurous and scary. Here is "Cuerpos," meaning "Bodies," the collective title for a sequence of five poems:

                       Cuerpos

August

My love has the form of a shoe
And in a little while a man
Is going to be inside my mouth.

Jasmine

In my bed
The smell of you stains my sheets.

Sex

You throw your feet outside the window
as I suck you like a cigar.

It is the first time.

Sweat

The moon takes a knife
And gouges out my eyes. I sweat
blood.

But the blood doesn’t have doors in
the dark
for the blood I cry at the foot of my
bed.

Dust

My love has the form of a shoe
And the people at the shoe store can’t
save me.

My pain bleeds in the afternoon
And when I am alone

(After that night in summer)

You will stay with me.

— Kiely Sweatt