When I Sing, Mountains Dance

by Irene Solà

Angry as a pair of pliers.

To grind my teeth together hard when the wolf-fart puffball exploded inside me.

This damn void won’t fill with resin. Because I married the most handsome man in these mountains.

Because the woods belong to those who cannot die.

Poetry has it all. Poetry has beauty, it has purity, it has music, it has images, it has words, recited out loud. It’s got freedom and the ability to move you, to let you glimpse the infinite. The great beyond. Infinity isn’t on Earth and it isn’t in heaven. The infinite dwells in each of us. Like a window on the top of our heads that we didn’t even know was there, and that the poet’s voice opens up little by little, and up there, through that crack, is the infinite.

The cold snuck into my chest, and Papá’s, like it was snowing in our hearts.

The weatherman Tomàs Molina says it will snow. Today. I say it won’t. I can tell when it’s about to snow, because the light is white. When it’s about to rain the light is gray, silvery. You start to see the gray light and the white light almost a day before. Depending on their intensity, you know how soon it will rain or snow.

That’s not snow, Tomàs Molina.

Mia has the equilibrium of embers, and it makes you calm, it makes you feel like laughing again, and drinking coffee, and makes you want the summer to arrive, and the autumn, or whatever it is that must arrive. Her face is like a tree, with two eyes like two ladybugs, and her mouth, hushed, and she just exudes peace, until suddenly she says something caustic as if there’d been a fire below the surface the whole time but I was only just noticing.

What I like best is when she whistles. With her fingers in her mouth. Because then I come running. I run as hard as I can, I jump, I fly like one of those little birds you just want to catch in your mouth, because they’re pretty and fast, and then grind your teeth together and feel all their bones break.

What's crazy is that she manages to hit the tenor of the person/place/thing while still anthropomorphizing it to hell

Butts smell fun and twisted up, much more interesting than the smell of feet, which is boring and actually smells just the same as shoes, which are more fun to chew for their rat shape than because they taste or smell good.

she’ll leave you like that, with your heart jammed up into your throat, frightened when you realize you were trespassing. With a ton of questions to ask, like

I have. Questions about the time they loved each other. About the thirst for love they sparked in me as a little girl. About Hilari’s death. About where Jaume is now. And about whether they’ve ever seen each other again. All that curiosity making little trails inside me, like a persistent woodworm.

Whether I’ve been drinking and smoking or not. I get up to walk and do what needs to be done. If you don’t get up early and walk, these late-night jobs will rot your soul.

And Carmeta drinks vermouth, and sometimes she comes in with her brother or her sister, both of them with long arms and a dusty grief inside.

cooking is like singing, there are those who are born knowing how, like a gift, but with a little bit of effort anyone can do it.

His hands are firm as he caresses me. After all that trembling I didn’t think they could grab anything so firmly. His mouth tastes of alcohol, of a wine reduction that’s been used for cooking, and he has lips, and his lips want me and his arms gather momentum, and I’d imagined I would be in my head, thinking about each gesture, thinking about every single thing that happened as it happened. But no. The blood, his hands, my hands, they just flow, taking the lead, faster, deeper, and we remove our clothes and we touch each other, and it had been a very long time since I’d touched a man’s penis.

Hilari was always the same thing. He was like the early morning air. Cool and thin and full of ideas and energy and possibility. But always like the morning air. Never like the heavy air of afternoon. Never like the sluggish air at midday, the blue air at dusk, or the dark night air. My

Another day he said his parents had made him out of snow. And

And now he’ll say some things. Things that lead steadily from one to the next, like beads on a string. The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. The ones that have to be pulled out, like onions. The ones that have to be said softly and the ones that have to be said little by little. The ones that burn. The ones that have to be said looking at the trees, and the ones that have to be said looking at the grass, the ones that have to be said looking at our hands, one on top of the other, and then looking at me. And I will

listen. Then I’ll say some things. The ones I can. And then the day will break. First gray, then blue, and then yellow.