Rosa Chávez, born 1980, is a Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet, artist, and activist born in Chimaltenango, Guatemala.
AT NIGHT, SHE’D TURN INTO A BEASTWOMAN
Rosa Chávez
Translated By Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez
At night, she’d turn into a beastwoman
leaping across the rooftops
walking hidden in the shadows
her four legs and little pretty girl face
her tail and round breasts moving side to side
a black shape wandering the cornfields
devouring delicious little animals
wooing the stars with her vacant gaze
the beastwoman gets home tired
remembering nothing the next day
she’d wake up with messy hair and wounded feet
with dirty nails and body in heat
one night, she went searching for the moonlight
she went down a ravine to find her destiny
and howl out her sorrows with the coyotes
she realized this life and death made sense
and never again returned to her good girl bed.
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I LIKE TO KISS SCARS
Rosa Chávez
I like to kiss scars
there, where the skin grows tougher
there, where the memories are visible
scars of every shape and size
small marks across your lips
on your eyelids, in your gaze
I like to kiss bodies that are cartographies
carved with destiny’s knife
I like scars
there, pain takes form
skin grows again
skin and heart become tougher
right where the blood was, right at the wound
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LET’S MAKE LOVE CRYING
Rosa Chávez
Let’s make love crying
to calm the shaking of the wind
to offset the loneliness of metaphor
and lose ourselves in the mystery of painful pleasure
let’s make love crying
a salty-moaned invocation
a prayer to the gods
of body and retinal movements
let’s make love crying
because despair never comes alone
because our strength
comes from an inscrutable mystery
like parts of the sea
swelling in our body
let’s make love crying
to wash the face of misery
to forget the fate of turbulent times
to cleanse the earth of her sorrows
let’s make love crying
because resisting the urge to cry as we make love
is a sacrilege we can’t allow
as good descendants of
death and the knife
let’s make love crying
because we have to cry
and we have to make love.
Translated from the Spanish