Annabell Manjarrés Freyle
(Santa Marta, 1985)
Communications specialist and journalist. Poet and storyteller. The Office of the Governor of Magdalena awarded her first place in poetry and second place for short story in the Poetry and Young Person’s Short Story Contest in 2013. She is the Bueno y Breve National Short Story Winner of El Túnel magazine from Montería in 2015, which she won with the story El hombre en su jaula [The Man in His Cage]. Author of three unpublished volumes of poetry: Espejo Lunar Blanco [White Moon Mirror], Óleo de una mujer acosada por el tiempo [Painting of a Woman harassed by Time], and Animales invertebrados [Invertebrate Animals]. Her poems have been translated into English, Catalan, French, and Italian, and appear in various national and international anthologies. She has written an unpublished collection of short stories and is currently working on her first novel. The next selection has been traslated by Ana María Correa:
Pieces of Men men pieces of men under foliage men transformed into pain pain of terrible weeping tears boiled in agonized prayer pieces of men cut into fourths the fifth part is still crying underneath the house the house is not human the fifth part screamed louder than the chainsaw a device invented by men men with their extremities still stuck to their trunks like trees trees were the first to encounter it they also fell screaming their leaves screamed their birds screamed. The men in pieces have screamed and the darkest part remained in their mothers’ navels the most visceral in their wives’ temples the most viscous part in their children’s drool the most eloquent carries messages of fright the shattered part belongs to their friends. Pieces of men packed together in no one’s laws the blood of no one is transfigured in the thicket at the pier they sleep in black bags their pieces among the rocks I have not seen them they’ve told me this country has told me on this sand the same wet, dry, uneven sand spread out among animals even to common hells. This country is a common grave they plant pieces of men germinating incomplete men and women their guardian angels have failed dark entities triumphed over faith Today, those who bury them are a procession of jigsaw puzzles. Beasts were born in that house the house was built with pieces of fallen trees in the sea a hand searches for any face to close its eyes and the stilt shantytown is ashamed. They’ve told me I have not seen it this country tells me before sleeping the national hell a symbol ripped into useless flags flags divided into two men men screaming Yes men answering No. A bird of prey flies over men in pieces the bird perches on the national crest no one has told me I’ve seen it on top of the palaces and since then my happiness is wary. Amphibian Solitude A morning can shed the shells that it breathed yesterday and regret them under the sheets. A machine of flesh stands up without the ghost of pride, surrendering to sleep a few minutes more under the sheets, under the rug, under an unknown guilt. On the bedside table, a teacup without tea or coffee opens its arms to you and says: “Push the rock to the highest point, little Sisyphus”. You know it would do no one any good to see a rock at the peak but the gods compel you. Overwriting your name, enclosing it in a circle will not return it to the one who sighed yesterday. Your name is your dress; your surname, your jacket: Annabell Naked Manjarrés Freyle. And, of course, your shoes are not your destiny, but they can walk it. You’ve watched time go to sleep, oh yes, you have: the body veering towards a corner, in the attempt to reconstruct the speeches yesterday sighed. And who sighs today begs all of the longing for return to go back to sleep and lull the infantile desire projected on cozy sheets and portable illusions. It would be easier to accommodate desire to what comes or annihilate it so that the days of water or earth are excellent. In any case, making the bed would be like dressing the name of the one who receives your body alone. I No Longer Read Tarot The midday mirage showed me the drowned dancer was only humidity. And in the afternoon’s stupor I could see the faces of those who disguised as God and conjugated me. I expressed my ignorance to them as the only truth and I became a shoddy believer. I ruined all predictions burning the cards from shuffling them at random so much. I took a fistful of sand… threw it at the sea. And the sand was my fate and the sea was nothingness. There is no reason for a creature of crystal to see beyond night. There’s no point. The swords that hacked me to pieces lie on the ground with my primitive blood. A distant woman is the blood that circulates within me with her metallic perfume, with her oxygen from the spring who did not know how to name things. I no longer read Tarot, it’s true, because it made fate out of everything I wanted alongside the sum of loose words which I uttered irresponsibly. The reflections that drained me were arriving from afar approaching me in the moment, and regardless, from that moment’s truth I received nothing but existence. Woman Out of Work Yesterday’s raindrops fall from the trees. Seated on a bench I hear the birds’ illustrious conversation. Get a job, say my servile, tie-wearing colleagues: Not everything with claws flies, I reply. The clouds of Santa Marta hide the sun in Scorpio while the moon is an impostor: night’s one-eyed, feline gaze. Salted angel feathers wrinkle on my back: likely tasting of time's catastrophic crumbling. I keep waiting for worldly help, without suffering. Nicotine promised to calm the imagination, the indigestible dawns. I’ve forgiven the sky for hiding November’s courage, I’ve raised my hand against every sign of authority. To absorb the wind’s happiness yawning is not enough: it is more honest to believe in the air’s motivations, in the levitating newspaper on Twentieth Street, in the dance of the trupillos in an observant plaza. Doubly efficient for leaping over black water, I gain time scraping the numbers on my ID like a lottery ticket. This soaking city denies my urgency’s dishonest games. I’ve Lost the Words… I’ve lost the words. I no longer clutch them in my fists. They left me during a bad shock and with the health of a brain bereft of green lagoons. Now I do not know how to interpret this imprisonment. How can I translate fluency? With what may I defend happiness when sad poems abound? How can I name indignation? Where are words when surprise brings me spacious valleys, allegories of freedom, and black soil for sowing my stubbornness? Could I, perhaps, list my obsessions? Where is the word in Spanish that lies on the border of the word “impossible”? Is the word “sleep” the key, the door, the window? Are words the skin in which discoveries rest? Why have they gone beyond my reach? This paralysis is from not being able to use them. They’re there, somewhere—talked over, violated, entombed in technical manuals, in the latest books, or in some Sufi burial. Why can’t I retain them in my mind, my eyes, in my hair incessantly speaking while I sleep? Words have left me during numerous exiles, they abandon me and I weep. I beg for them, I beg, hitting my head. I blame myself like a victim unsure of her tragedy: I blame myself for having forgotten them. Song of the Minotaur To be a mirror facing another mirror, the virtue of infinite beings. And to judge oneself infinite in one’s own reflection reveals obsessive truths. Certainties which, involuntarily, open unstable doors where it is only possible to find answers in the generosity of dreams. It is my duty to await Theseus to put to sleep the forms of my anguish and find, with the intuition of a god, the door to the right epiphanies. How could one not understand that shelves are the windows of Crete! I only know it is night because I grow old and my eyes can barely descry Ariadne’s mythical beauty. Ariadne, Ariadne: perhaps you will never remember that it was I who freed you from the labyrinths of a library from Buenos Aires. The Bee Woman I am here because I have paid. Now I deserve other dances, a cycle of new moons. I came for the recent sprouting of the tamarinds, for the florescence that lowers the profile of the stars. I have conjured these dances, I have prayed. I belong to the seeds of a winter sunflower, to the rice family, to the mango clan, to the tribe that climbed branches of mamón. I have paid Saturn for all my naive crimes and I’ve learned from the tribes, warm silence in their hexagonal habitations. I have surrendered to the river the error of my old self-image and mature sadness in the mother’s womb. I deserve other fruit, children from less thankless lands. The mountains were right to be climbed with sacrifice. The bee woman sacrificed her venom in delicate and dangerous places. She gave it all. Poisoned the air where perfumes flowered. Manjarrés You forged the ovum of my eternal femininity and then went away leaving me empty embraces and the reflection of your face in mine that I still cannot accept. There is something of you in all of the men I have loved, because after delirium only a poem remains. We were one body my mother and I when you pursued the sexual aroma of an adolescent devoid of ambition. But today, on the cusp of your old age, I’ve come to remind you that I am your only daughter, the one you will never replace in the arms of any other. Wilderness and Origin I am alone in my woman wilderness, trying to suffocate the symbol in my unconquerable wilderness. Inhabited by virgin beasts and unbreakable spirits. Inhabited by whiffs of rain (mud in the air) and the scent of tigers stalking my jealous females. I let my hair grow in silence to find the calm of forgiveness and a breeze over the dead foliage of words. And from this jungle of desires flow my rivers of blood. And I scream to suffocate all the symbols and return ever to myself. My Voice in a Labyrinth My voice rejected its tongue. It was the tool of bad words used against me. It condemned me to a constellation of predictable acts. It held me subject to other songs, but I know nothing of songs or silent doves. I know nothing of beings flying over me on beach afternoons measured by arpeggios, where I could not care less about hurling my soul into life. On paper I pantomimed a powerful scream, to kill them, those with distinguished voices, and take pity on myself: My poor voice, poor. Who separated herself from speech and spoke just to talk. Who pretended to be a guardian of silence while leaving the house filthy with interior noise. Poor thing, poor. She who visited suns and set on street corners. Dyslexia Too much drama on so little ground. An existential crisis—I learned later— is not being able to reach an agreement with each of your faces. My aerial face, my song face, my cruel face. Hardened face in front of the monitor while my hands smile at the keys. One observes oneself like a powerless god drinking in decisions according to rhythm and applause. Better to sleep: to surrender with enthusiasm, in an armchair or something similar. To sleep is to cooperate with eternity. It’s to cover mirrors with an archangelic cloth. Better to awaken: name objects although faces ache, that way, the eye’s crystalline flesh is not so pure in uncertainty. Better still, any decision: an imprecise reading awakens something animalistic, and that something, bleary and broken, disorients doves. How disastrous: one just took flight and I could not go with her. Poems in the End Times Write poems in the end times, when clouds are no longer clouds and roofs fly off. When the buzzing in the sky of my mouth is no longer from storms, when others come to replace us and there’s no time left. Therefore, you must write poems and cut them in half. Paste on an image of another near-forgotten verse and learn to live with the fragment of a workshopped poem. Overworked poems from an old feeling, a past experience, a useless voice. An echo that only sounds like an echo. A poem weary of saying absence, a poem weary of saying love, a poem weary of saying loneliness, sex, autumn, wine, sentiment, blue sky, and perfumed flowers. A poem weary of the perfume of flowers. Write poems at the end of the street, with a period and next line in front of my feet. Go down another block… die out and discover the man scent I followed, while biting apples whole, turned out to be only an equation. A Prayer for Outdoing Eve I Woman, you are no longer Eve. You do not need to carry the guilt anymore or awake with that pain on one side of the world. You are no longer a goddess, because all of the gods are imaginary and carry under their cloaks suicidal delusions. II You are no longer Eve for the first time on Earth and Earth… the Earth is naked, but is not Eve either: she shakes out her volcanic skirts and sinks. She feels more blue and of gills than feathered hands. And the Moon, the Moon is not Eve either. She was born round and magnetic nevertheless, they judge her for it. III You can insist on arriving barefoot without searching for yourself in masculine versions, and so avoid the discomfort of comparing fertility to a field flattened by a despotic river. Do you even care about drunkenly following the path of a star? IV You’re in style with that executive sweat, muttering an “Our Father” detached from the mother; receiving heliconias only to watch them wither in their vase, rusted, stinking of copper, like pieces of endometrium punished by a moon cycle. V When you were a girl, you played hide-and-seek with your eyes blindfolded by innocence. As a teenager, you fell in love with the sun in men’s gazes. As an adult, you tossed the blindfold to acknowledge a man taken by your hand. As an old woman, filled with birds, you flew over the wreckage shaking out the fragile sheet of the past. VI Predictable rib, the victories would have been different if Eve had written God’s bestseller.
Annabell Manjarrés Freyle 