Translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel

after Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”

shade of García Lorca, what are you doing here,
hidden in the deepest cubicles? / and you, Perlongher?
here we are / looking at images
peeking sideways at the naked boys who appear on the screens
of the real boys seated beside you
tall burly lanky hairy

where will we go tonight? what places will we visit?
where does the mouse point us? we’re followed
by the manager of the place
jealously attentive

but what screens and what shadows
what lights and what glimmers / among galleries of chairs and rows
of voyeurs and clairvoyants who don’t see clearly
and want to take the ship to the other shore
to submerge themselves for an hour or two in the river Lethe
where memory is measured in gigabytes / and one forgets
the outer kingdom of the storm

Fabián O. Iriarte is the Argentinian author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Devoción por el azar, Litmus test, El punto suspensivo, and Pocas probabilidades de lluvia. His first book in English translation is The Confessions (Entre Ríos Books, forthcoming 2022). He teaches comparative literature and English-language literature at the National University of Mar del Plata in Argentina. (8/2021)

Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) writer who has published over 120 books as author or anthologist. He has won, among other honors, the Lambda Literary Award (twice) and a Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. He is also a literary translator, in both directions; his recent work includes, into English, Hatchet by Carmen Boullosa and Destruction of the Lover by Luis Panini, and into Spanish, Bluets by Maggie Nelson. (8/2021)