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Written by Estíbaliz Espinosa and translated by Lawrence Schimel. Read the original in Galician.

if you open an apple

if you split its heart in half

with a crisp slice

one of those that give off a scent

a deep red scent among a chlorophyll

silence

 

if you open an apple like that between your

primate hands

those hands which I don't know and yet adore

 

if you | cut the | apple along | its imaginary | apple axis

its apple equator /split in twain/

in the introverted air above the head of a dozing Newton

of a son of William Tell with a foreboding

if you open the apple of Turing

the stepmother apple

the bitten apple with a rainbow sweater

 

if you open the apples that are more apple than all apples

and all the apples of the world

acidic and nucleic

the camoesas I never tried

that apple of Paris turned into an Hesperides

that mad young man with women's clothing

cross-dressed apple

with teethmarks and a drupe fruitful

to voracity

 

if you do this

 

if you do this

 

stick your tongue into the five pointed star that surrounds the poem

la pomme

la pomme fatale

star-shaped seedbed

cyanide seeds

 

blue acid that weakens cellular ties

 

stick your tongue into what nobody dares

stick your tongue until it hurts into the end of the flowering apple

 

crash with your tongue against the seed of the abyss

that is to say

break into speech

 

break into speech flooding live what was once dark

in the explosive center of a fetal fruit made into light

 

your tongue

toward the supernatural

 

from curiosidade, 2015



Estíbaliz Espinosa (A Coruña, Spain): writer. Musician. Philologist and sociologist. Dilettante astronomer. Her poetic work emerges from her curiosity about literature and science (linguistics, puns, maths, astrophysics or biology), and from her search for new approaches to content, on paper or screen She also writes—in Galician and Spanish—short stories and articles; she runs workshops and musical readings. Her most recent poetry book is Curiosidade.
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