Magdalena Arias Vásquez
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Amen
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There was a box of Marlboros on the floor,
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                                                                                                  On the couch there were sounds like spirals

you picked them up, gave birth to a flame,

                                                                                  spun out of the tightly wound melodies of youths

gnarled with robberies: yours first

                                                                                  like a tiny sunrise in a pitch black room

mine second, with the cyclical rhythm

                                                                                 of private property taken like a public commodity,

saint they called the man who tied you to this rhythm
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                                                                                 and saint was the name you called him when he burned me.

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Magdalena Arias Vásquez is a poet and translator based in NYC. She is a recent graduate from Williams College, where she majored in English and French and spent a lot of her time reading and avoiding the freezing Massachusetts temperatures. A lot of her work centers questions of memory in Latin America, anchored by experiences of American intervention and dictatorship in Panama. When she's not writing, she spends her time taking photographs, making matcha and giving her friends an absurd amount of book recommendations.

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