No cuelgues written by Alí Calderón
Translated from the Spanish by Alejandra González Jiménez   

Don’t hang up! I mean it, don’t leave! Stay!
Don’t answer that endless incoming call! 
Don’t let me hear that tone of comfort for him
                                                           “Hello, how are you?”
and for me an anvil strike.
Don’t tell me I’ll talk to you later because that time 
I know now,
we all know, 
we always knew, never comes.

This silence like a century of light years away
                                                   can be mistaken for calmness.

I’ve explained over and over again in every way that 
you are your smile is your breasts are your lips were
not the momentary happiness 
of feeling as one and loving one another other,
                     but rather the infinitely, defined, unchangeable, necessary
                                                          condition of happiness

Migraines and tremors have already pained my body. 
                             Imbalances inhabit the vertiginous
                                                malfunction of sternum, xiphoids
                                                                both ventricles.

I am a rag, a scream, a rope tensed by anguish! 

Slow, but with certainty, we near the suppression.
Old and insignificant, like pieces of a boring museum
                                                             that nobody visits.
Our memories creep and erode.
Nothing of the literal electricity 
                                                  that flew over the principles.
Nothing in your eyes of the tenderness and fear 
                                                    when you were looking at me.
Even less of the love that sprouted and extended 
                                                       when we were making love.

Everything that we represent and are 
                                            sinks in the ocean of impossibility.

How lonely! How sad!  

How much injustice in the intermittence of the telephone!
How unfair unrequited love is!
How much misery in this asymmetry!

The state of siege has been finally lifted.
All defenses ruined.    
                                                          I surrender my swords.
                                                I’m at the mercy of humiliation.
                                                                      I give up.
I hang up the phone.