Traba Nada
Our hero, Pablo Traba, has left his human race to rot under the guava tree at the highest point of his mother’s land, a cosmic effort to turn the hot sun of the mountains into stars in his divine black out. From the main square you can’t make him out from the sleepy town condor, who had stopped visiting the Traba land for fear he’d get knocked again pecking a taste out of the vinegary boy, whose particular pose was that of an anteater curled in a sea of tranquility. En esa montaña de sereno, in that black peak, the only peak in el Cauca entero known to go this dark in the daytime, Pablo groaned to ward off its inhabitants. The Misak no longer let church bells chase their hunt off, but for now they had Pablo withdrawing like an angel rehab-ing in the town, down from Chiquitas and opioids heaven. He hated how much everyone tried to cleanse him, coca leaf and smoke ceremonies, mist over the mountains, burial songs, banana leaf whippings, nothing sent him higher into the mountains than Ron Viejo and the putrid guava earth under this tree since Don Mercurio the pharmacist discovered what cough he was really addressing with all that codeine… The tree picked up all the valley’s noises and turned it into fruit nobody would eat, so everything was Pablo’s: the ELN soldier visiting his alien mother in a jaguar suit losing battles in el Huila but having won his own land back at least; the Western Union lady telling the ice lady how much his mom’s alimony had grown since the dollar shot up; the two kids he taught how to spin the bottle, playing; his researcher, who hates him, making fuck sounds at an oso de anteojos. He begins to feel Catholic, visionary and depressed, he hears his mother landing the telephone on the moon, his father’s signal interrupted by the Andes, el Cauca entero llenándose de voces, and the condor, patient, nearby again, protected by his groaning.
–Brian Alarcon
Brian Alarcon is a Colombian-American poet, performance and visual artist from Queens, New York. His poetry crosses the borders between mediums and industries, having performed at art galleries, for media clients such as Versace and Drome Magazine, non-profits like City Artists Corps and Counterpath Press, and he’s received fellowships from the Queer|Art Foundation and the Jack Kerouac School.