Around the enormous geyser in Yellowstone National Park
  bacterial coatings interweave the large blue pool of flora
  —sterile by the fevered heat of a floor of great profundity
  but so marvelously multicolored on the sides
  that couples retrace the paths
  of splintered wood in the air
  above four scaffolds.

  The virgin forest
  that you did not want to open
  springs forth
  from the geyser
  although it foamed as if rabid—like Alka-Seltzer in a glass—
  and she wanted to tell you what happens before and after death (of the night).

  The mud siren whose beauty floats in a mantle of aquatic invertebrates
  (worms    snails     crabs dragonflies…           women’s bracelets)
  it does not reign below;      she leaves your immense pool motionless.

  Spring
  is still stammering
  but summer here    breaks in acidic humors (lime red)
  and winter will wrap her in leaf green       burst-cocoon green:
  its egg into nymph larva pupa     and you alone can at the pool’s
     refulgent bottom
  inside the cruel lake: mouths painted like puppets 	with golden threads
     like the face
  of princess WanDou over one of the jade (before)              2,600 tesserae.

  I'll let you bring    your bloody sex under a fluffy white coat
  and your hand bejeweled with some other woman's severed hand
      (perhaps Norma J. Baker:
  with teeth bleached punctually  in seconal)
  that smoothly adjusts to your wrist.

  Row and shut up row and shut up suck and row
  among the eyes of crab of chameleon     I see a field of climbing algae
  of wine-colored octopi and heads with bandanas     that fill your tongue
      with graffiti
  voice
  I lift this music box up to the shell of your ear
  listen,    it's Les Quartiers de Paris:
  a spiral of circular sewers
  within which to float on the stultiferanavis.

  The stone of madness, the moon stone, the angular stone,
  the philosopher
  stone
  can be extracted through the nose and quickly embalm you
  or you can let yourself rot walled up in your own body
  of flourmill straw     of weight gleaned from rice.

  From mud
  a vile layer
  with  inlays of worms
  clamshells      crunching rustling of dragonfly bodies:
  you'll be iron then      a blazing red iron
  that spreads between your thighs when you choose
  (to be a White she-Buddha)

  until winter arrives:
  and you become sleeping eyes-green
  a woman's green rage and green
  Sally Bowles’s nails
  which in the middle
  of the drenched
  snow
  can be crossed vertically: a tree instead of a bulb in bloom.

  Over the melting
  water for you
  all the dead can be reassembled
  kaleidoscope   with the iris      pulled out
  in Yellowstone, The Grand Prismatic Spring.

  In runners
  purple
  and mauve
  hallways:
  pride
  slowly rotting
  —how a hand-knitted
  carpet grows—
  you'll prick yourself softly
  and the oasis
  will violently break  around April:
  orchards of lilacs
  all the lilacs
  alive and dead
  to defoliate
  in May.
  You will   be rigorously pruned
  prýgai, visná
  (jump, jump, spring)

  cornering

  the garden lashes into you.

• poetry by Domingo Alfonso
• poetry by Rito Ramón Aroche
• poetry by Caridad Atencio
• poetry by Miguel Barnet
• poetry by Pierre Bernet
• poetry by Yanelys Encinosa Cabrera
• poetry by Alberto Peraza Ceballos
• poetry by Maria Liliana Celorrio
• poetry by Felix Contreras
• art by Wally Gilbert
• poetry by Georgina Herrera
• poetry by Karel Leyva
• poetry by Robert Manzano
• poetry by Roberto Méndez Martínez
• poetry by Jamila Medina
• poetry by Edel Morales
• poetry by Alex Pausides
• poetry by Roberto Fernandez Retamar
• poetry by Soleida Ríos
• poetry by Mirta Yáñez
• Frogpondia