Daniel Shapiro es autor de los libros de poemas Child with a Swan’s Wings (2013), The Red Handkerchief and Other Poems (2014) y “Woman at the Cusp of Twilight” (inédito). Su traducción de Cipango (2010) del poeta chileno Tomás Harris recibió excelente crítica en Library Journal. Su poesía y su prosa han sido publicadas en American Book Review, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, y The Brooklyn Rail. También se ha incluido su trabajo en las antologías Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Vapor Transatlántico/Tramp Steamer y The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Ha recibido becas de National Endowment for the Arts y PEN para traducir Cipango y el libro Desaparecidos, animales y artistas de Roberto Ransom. Shapiro se desempeña como director Literatura y editor de Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas en The Americas Society in New York.
Numbers and Rooms
I began as something shameful, something flawed, when I faced the stark reflection of myself in the gold bathroom mirror, kept my mouth closed
in fear, saw my father’s jaw drop open when he’d spring my door, inside a lover piled on me, the window screened by oleander.
I rode asphalt crests through hills that summer, stink of skunk-spray, aloe, honeysuckle, cows. I parked—lights flicked through smog—eased down my zipper.
I rode all night in a white Camaro with a young Filipino who picked me up in the Brass Rail. He pushed my head to his lap
and made me love it, made me see my body furtively, growing, shrinking from itself. Seeking what? Sidling into nights unseen, cruising men with molded torsos guiding their hips through huge underground discos, one-night scenes,
a fraud to myself. Where else if not here could eyes dart black pools of mirrors, numbers and rooms where another pair of eyes waited for me?
The stiff plunge in beneath a whirring fan. Afterwards, the twin robes printed with cranes. Too scared of what I was, what I might be,
the naked fear of discovery, (which, in my flight home, pitted me against sunrise and the dignity of tenderness)
to feel what a man might feel for a man in the flash of seed sprung from willing triggers dueled beneath our faces dumb with pleasure.
TAPFNY – The Americas Poetry Festival of New York
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