BIO
Layla Benitez-James (Austin, 1989) is a poet, translator, and artist living in Alicante, Spain. Her writing has appeared in The San Antonio Express-News, Acentos Review, Matter, Guernica, and Autostraddle, among other places. Translations can be found in Waxwing and Anomaly. Poems translated into Spanish are published in Revista Kokoro, La Caja de Resistencia and La Galla Ciencia Numero IV with bilingual presentations in Spain including El Tren de los Poetas in Cuenca, Los Lunes Literarios, La Galla Ciencia, Café Zalacaín in Murcia, and La poesía es noticia: Moth & Rust / Óxido y polilla, una sesión de poemas en inglés y español in Alicante. Audio essays about translation can be found at Asymptote JournalPodcast. She currently works with the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid as their Director of Literary Outreach. Her first chapbook, God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure was selected by Major Jackson for the 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and published by Jai-Alai Books in Miami, April 2018.
Utility & Return
In Jalisco there is a
house made of doors.
Only one will open.
What is a door
if it will not open?
What is a house
if it cannot close?
And the mind? Is
synapse
welded onto synapse,
pidgin-
dust closings shocked
open?
A door is made of a
million
splinters: what is a
splinter
if it has not
pierced
your flesh? And the
heart?
I begin making
notches
until I forget what it
was
I was ferreting away
in my pockets.
Pockets made of the
idea
of emptiness and
return. I collect celery-young
sticks until I
decide what to build. Little
bridge over water? A
fort
in the woods? It feels
urgent.
To build a place
I will never live, I
have
collected celery
splinter after
feather after feather
after hollow
long log, stone
hinge, muñeca,
grace, the torso of
the arrow:
each dull thing
shocked open.
Kingdom
Any
desire which can be satisfied is no desire
at all.
Parched tributaries of
creeks,
stuffed with tall, dry
grasses who covet the dark-hearted
cloud which gives not a
glance of wetness,
are the true monuments of
longing.
You
have compromised the structural integrity of my days.
Though you left me for
dead,
the vultures knew the difference
and the vultures kept their distance.
This is not my first rust
thought for you.
Any
desire which cannot be
is no desire at all. Very well then,
nothing ever was built in
a day
except a day.