Six Poems by Izaskun Gracia Quintana

Happy New Year, Readers and Writers! It's rough out there, but here's hoping you had the chance to spend some time with loved ones in a safe and meaningful way.

We're excited to start the year with a collection of six poems from Spanish writer Izaskun Gracia Quintana. Her poetry plays with space and percussive language to pull you in and keep you there.

Thank you so much for your continuing support, and happy reading!

The Derailleur Press Team

we pronounce
we do
unauthorized sentences floating in the ignorance of what counts and doesn’t reach us
while we fear your next step and our discomfort
how easy to evoke you and get lost on your stage
how comfortable to impersonate the unknown and take care of what doesn’t exist
or isn’t coherent
or doesn’t explain your words beyond each expression
we are experts in what we do not master
                                                    where we aren’t wanted
intruders
annoying within this blurred frame until the next concoction and a new conspiracy

​I didn’t want to fall and they defenestrated me
I died and they revived me
and they filled my chest with good feelings while they impaled my body
just to pretend they were trying to heal me
it may be a simple and complicated game
                                                                                     a fear organizer
​                                                                                     restructuring what makes us tremble
so that we learn to behave
to be one and lose everything for the sake of another hug
to cry in winter what we formerly didn’t know how to defend
when we still could in the shade of other trees
shattered this sound the days worsen the hours to the sky which is dyed blue under the
                                                                                                          [mountains that no more rise over our heads
​


I will see my eyes burning in the sand of insomnia and I will fail to pity you
as I failed in other attempts driven by sleep or recklessness
because I’ve already fulfilled all my years
I’ve seen others digging my trenches
and
           furrow to furrow
​                                                 I broke up the mistakes that will haunt me
like an announced catastrophe
on the verge of narcosis or the breakdown of other brands
while
            blind
                         I endure
​the burden of apology for the undeniable and the stigma of another disappointment


not even time is revealed faithful
from shelters built under layers of words
we see the snow colonize the streets
in disorder and bewilderment
as if the world
                              ready to unleash all its monsters
​                                                                                                   had already started to break
to make way for the end
and finish the absurd crying
of those who haven’t really lost anything


we wait in calm for the storm to break
for the rain to follow the thunder
to clean the streets we will walk when it clears up
and give us back the smell of lost purity
we wait another day
another time to look up and take up the fight
and know that we are in a forest that does not embrace us
and opens ravines in our guts
before even learning to walk


not even in the emergency I feel flock
I do not share the pain or the purge
nor the relief when the exception comes to an end
and the world pretends that everything goes back to the way it was 
I am a spectator
I activate mirrors I recite commercials
and I sleep loaded with questions without a place in this show
stubbornly shuffling pieces of another puzzle
moving towards the same site at the rate of all the alarms

Izaskun Gracia Quintana (Bilbao (Spain), 1977) is a Basque Filology graduate, translator, graphic designer and fotographer who lives in Berlin (Germany) since 2011. She has published several poetry books: fuegos fatuos (2003), eleak eta beleak (2007), saco de humos (2010), ártica / artikoa (2012), vacuus (2016), despertar lloviendo (2017), Ohe hutsetan (2018) and soliloquio soterrado (2021), and the short stories compilations Crónicas del encierro (2016) and Lo que ruge (2021). Her poems have been translated into English, French, German and Greek and have appeared in several anthologies.