Lucía Estrada

trans. by Olivia Lott

Offering

Your body puts up a fight for a moment, your eyes have gotten used to the shadow. A rope around your neck, glowing weight on your back. Then it’s not worth it to put up your truth against a violence that sinks you effortlessly, finishes you off at the gates of you. You’re shaking.

Air has stripped its branches. You’re a small creature between the tiger’s teeth, and your blood traces damp, half-done silhouettes that know nothing about light. Inside, every fiber will burn until reduced to ash. You’re shaking, sacrificial stone snatched from night. Everything in you bites, shrinks. Inside and out, like a flare-up right on your face. 

You give in. Day will slice up your body. After all, you’re part of the offering.

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada's Katabasis, which is forthcoming from Eulalia Books in October 2020, and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos's The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions). She is the curator of Poesía en acción on Action Books' blog. Lott is ABD in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing a dissertation on translation, revolution, and 1960s neo-avant-garde poetics in Latin America. Twitter: @oliviamlott 

Lucía Estrada (Medellín, 1980) is the author of ten books of poetry. She is the two-time winner of the Bogotá Poetry Prize, most recently in 2017 for her latest collection Katábasis (2018), which was also named a finalist for the Colombian National Poetry Prize. Estrada is currently the Cultural Coordinator at the Corporación Otraparte in Medellín. The first full-length English-language translation of her poetry, Katabasis, is forthcoming in October 2020 from Eulalia Books.