A FOREIGN PLACE

what I like most about this place

is knowing it’s foreign

the paths shorten

from familiarity

or love

but these streets my feet have devoured

and their corners

and their homeless

that left their hope

behind the trashbags

are not mine

they have no taste

let’s not cry for histories

we didn’t tell

I won’t miss them

because it’s possible to be born a foreigner

and it’s possible to forget the harbor

to be dedicated to the shipwreck

to return to the sea

home, home

mine is always

the next stop.

LUGAR AJENO

lo que más me gusta de este lugar

es saberlo ajeno

los caminos se acortan

con costumbre

o con afecto

pero estas calles que mis pies han devorado

y sus esquinas

y sus abandonados

que dejaron sus esperanzas

tras las bolsas de basura

no son mios

no son mias

no tienen sabor

no vamos a lamentar las historias

que no nos contamos

y no voy a extrañarlo

porque se puede nacer extranjera

y se puede olvidar el puerto

para dedicarse al naufragio

para entregarse al mar

casa, casa

la mia siempre es

la proxima parada.

Hael Lopez is the author of Rutinas/Despedidas (Sion Editorial, 2018). Born in 1994 in Guatemala City, she now lives in El Tejar, Chimaltenango. She’s studying Sociology and has been featured in readings and festivals in Guatemala City, Chimaltenango, Sumpango, and Xela. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming (in translation) in Columbia Journal Online, Empty Mirror, Guernica, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

Translator from Spanish to English: Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.