Featured poet: Álvaro Agurto Pincheira

Álvaro Agurto Pincheira (Concepción, 1978) is a professor of special education at the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación. He lived in Mexico from 2012 to 2015, where he studied a Licenciatura in Letras Hispánicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has participated in literary workshops with Carmen García, Germán Carrasco and the Mexican writer Citlali Ferrer.

i go in for ear acupuncture
to get something out of the day

*

i throw myself on the grass
to wait for

a beetle

*

i don’t know whether to throw my guitar in the water

*

Dylan wrote the present
with a worn-out guitar

*

don’t think twice

*

i took my desk apart
then thought of my guitar
as the lightning rod
of my words

*

i remember the boy
that i once was
in front of the TV
and paid attention

to his breathing

*

where the wind
dries clothes
in a second
i’ll reply
about what it is
i want to preserve

*

spanning the shores of what i couldn’t say:
the bridge of instinct

*

i looked at the photos a long time
as if something of mine
had been saved in them

*

those stuck to the wall
are starting to peel away a little

*

when the sign on a car dealership
ends my sentence
when the day gives me its tone
in a song overheard passing by

*

i sit next to the river
to fish for poems that swim down
the ones my older brothers have let go

*

that metro station
was the preamble to every
meeting with you
i wanted to wait for you
playing the guitar

*

walking around the room
i listen to folk
and see there’s a hole forming
in the sole
of my right sneaker

*

i don’t need a wider horizon
than that of a poem
while i wait sitting
on a chair
that isn’t mine

*

to pay attention to things
that appear          alight          and depart
on a blank page

— translated by Jessica Sequeira