Carlos Pintado
The Spencer Tunick Picture

Between what I write and what I want to write, there’s a corpse. A naked body we know by heart, a mother’s tears, a lamp fading away. You look at the posters on the bathroom door, the picture where I took off my clothes for Spencer Tunick, the books that filled up the empty chimney, the swords with Celtic engravings. Then you asked if all of that belonged to a foreign world, a kind of flight. The light was shining and I played the album Ella & Louis. Dear soul of yours that will be mine someday: any beach will be glorious and you will bite the fruit while we remain silent. This is how I intended to begin the poem but your hand touched mine and there was nothing but the silence of a strange serpent encircling us.

 
Found In Volume 45, No. 05
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Carlos Pintado
About the Author

Carlos Pintado is a Cuban American writer, playwright, and award-winning poet who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s. His book Autorretrato en azul received the prestigious Sant Jordi International Prize for Poetry, and his book El azar y los tesoros was a finalist for Spain’s Adonais Prize in 2008. His work has been translated into English, Italian, German, French, Turkish, Portuguese, and Italian. His latest collection of poetry, Nine Coins/Nueve monedas, was selected for the The National Poetry Series by United States' inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, and published in a bilingual edition by Akashic Books.