Carlos Egaña

Dorotea or Doroteo,

your orgasm is indifferent to its origin.

may your present not be about your organs – or the lack thereof

or what they determine in your eyes and your mind

or what they don’t, and other inherited myths,

but about smiles and dance moves.

be clumsy and conjure your indifference, your aversion toward the machine that embellishes.

never forget that your name comes last, that experience goes first,

that identity, in summary, is a trap

& that pleasure always precedes naming.

[Originally published in Spanish in Los Palos Grandes (dcir ediciones, 2017).]

bipolar, bilingual – I

try to desert this garden of adjectives

and squash the choices my government gave me.

I stray from the walkways, I lock my heart

on a labyrinth.

[dicen que un clavo saca otro clavo,

pero eso es solo rima.] sometimes I’d rather a hammer

to twist my insides. sometimes I’d rather a corkscrew.

Carlos Egaña (Caracas, 1995) recently finished his MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University. He has also taught courses on Gender Studies and Modern North American Fiction at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. He has two poetry books in print: hacer daño (Oscar Todtmann Editores, 2020) and Los Palos Grandes (dcir ediciones, 2017). And he writes about art, politics and pop culture for various Venezuelan publications. In his last year of college, he was one of the faces of the student movement amidst the Venezuelan presidential crisis.