Lucía Estrada

trans. by Olivia Lott

Quotidian

A bitter smirk comes loose from my mouth, rolls down the street, vanishes. Somewhere, somebody cultivates mirrors to erase everything. Its purpose echoes in every air syllable.

Living is a strange condition of death. I carry it with me, but its phantom moon is weightless on my body. 

A name is diluted in every reflected face. I beg for mine to stay cryptic. 

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.