Iguazu
“I suppose the devil has many throats.”
– Allegra Hyde
This one is a waterfall.
At the bottom of it, he leans over
to kiss me, but I don’t like that
particular translation.
Let’s call it what they call it
here: La Garganta del Diablo,
so you can hear the Pantagruel inside it.
The gargantuan
gargle, the diabolical garbling.
All those open vowels that flee the mouth
like a knot of bats blooming
into a net with which to dredge
the evening’s speckled feast.
Keep the growl. Instead of stitching shut
the name with a skinny fricative,
the mouth bored
open by awe’s dull augur.
Into an o, doubling the falls’ stone horseshoe
so it’s large enough for the horse of rain
that barrels over the plains on blurry
slanted legs that swish like curtains
in a morgue. The mouth, then,
a rounded echo
of the jellied little orbs of water that float
down before the impact blasts them
into mist that touches
everything as evenly as the roar
that drums our hearing ——
humbled slug —— back
into its swirling shell of blood
and blood and blood and blood and blood,
each orb a little lens in which we bend
huge, cartoonish, looming
in our yellow helmets, red lifejackets,
in a long and crowded boat
at the edge of the plunge pool,
where he leans over
to kiss me,
and I lean away
from the Garganta,
toward Antarctica,
which clicks in my mouth,
cold and sharp as a wind-whittled icicle
on the eave of a building where
a scientist recently stabbed another
because he kept spoiling the ending
to every book he was
trying to hornswoggle time with.
ξ
Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the fifth-annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His debut collection of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2021. Recent work appears (or will soon) in 32 Poems, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Sixth Finch, among others. He lives in Ohio.