Mint

Valeria Meiller
Translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos

He says: On the dock is a trickle of birds and outdoors is the sea, in the place of oscillating lights. It’s the world. See? There, where the belly of the ocean is bent, it’s more noticeable. What does it make you feel? A strange sense of vertigo, no? The world arches, but could well disappear into a black hole. When we return to the field, everything will be over, but right now the sea moves slowly, driven by a large, secret oar.

        She thinks: The intimacy I am familiar with is another kind, neighbor of the gardens and high tea, under the pretext of jasmine and conversation about trees. At that hour, we’d be under the lindens celebrating birds chirping in their nests; we’d have hearts of mint or honey, something wild with an aroma. In the country house, the kettle would come to a boil while we grazed elbows. The elbow of the water, on the other hand, is solitary and, where the horizon line seals the East, everything seems dead. There my body closes, under many locks and many keys.

        And so she responds: My feet are wet, and it’s almost night. I’m not plotting anything, let’s go back.

 

La Menta

Él dice: En la dársena hay un reguero de pájaros y el mar está afuera, en el lugar de las luces oscilantes. Es el mundo. ¿Ves? Ahí donde se curva la panza del océano se nota mejor.

     ¿Qué te despierta? Una sensación de vértigo extraordinaria, ¿no es cierto? El mundo se arquea pero bien podría desaparecer por un agujero negro. Cuando volvamos al campo, todo estará acabado, pero ahora mismo el mar se mueve con lentitud, impulsado por un remo enorme y secreto.

     Ella piensa: La intimidad que me es familiar es otra, vecina de los jardines y la hora del té, bajo la excusa de los jazmines y la conversación sobre los árboles. A esa misma hora nos reuniríamos debajo de los tilos a celebrar el bullicio de los nidos, tendríamos el corazón de menta o de miel, algo silvestre con aroma. En la casa de campo, la pava herviría mientras nos rozáramos los codos. El codo del agua, en cambio, es solitario y donde el Este se sella con la línea del horizonte todo parece muerto. Allí se cierra mi cuerpo bajo muchos cerrojos y muchas llaves.

   Entonces responde: Tengo los pies mojados y ya es casi entrada la noche. No estoy tramando nada, regresemos.

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Headshot of Valeria Meiller

Valeria Meiller is an Argentine-born writer based in New York. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a core faculty member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. She is the author of the Spanish-language poetry collections El mes raro—translated into English by Whitney DeVos as The Odd Month (Black Ocean, 2024)—El libro de los caballitos, and El Recreo. She is currently working on a documentary poetry book, provisionally titled Vaca Muerta, about the unconventional oil and gas formation of the same name in Neuquén, Argentina, which has been at the center of the country’s environmental and economic agenda since fracking was authorized there in 2010.

Black-and-white headshot of a smiling Whitney DeVos
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Chris Iduma

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, editor, and literary historian based in Mexico City. She specializes in contemporary literatures of Abiayala, or the hemispheric Americas, with a focus on poetry. She has translated or co-translated four poetry collections and three chapbooks, alongside various essays and scholarly articles. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, and MacDowell, among other institutions. She is presently a co-editor of Ruge el bosque, a series of plurilingual ecopoetry anthologies, and a producer of the project’s experimental podcast, Ecoteca. She currently teaches in the Department of Letters at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

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The Odd Month
Black Ocean

Boston/Chicago

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Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.

The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.

“Moody and evocative, the poems in The Odd Month beguiled me. Suffused by fragile shadows, hunting rifles, sugar-lump-sized bunnies, ferocious plums, and a deep longing for rain, these ecological and philosophical fragments capture the weirdness and wonder of living in relationship to a place.”
—Cecily Parks, author of O'Nights

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