Patria Archipelago Leo Boix (bio), Alexandra Lytton Regalado (bio), and Ulises Vaquerano Ramírez (bio) [NOTE: View the PDF version to view the text and images together.] responding to Kati Horna's photographic series Ode to Necrophilia And then the time came to be inside this island a room he carved out of (the maskgrinned, the mask always grinned) foreign things he often dreams of: an Englishumbrella by his unmade bed a pair of worn-out shoes (not his) a candle—una vela candela burning in broad daylight Outside, a desperate fire …He stands half-dressed in the middle of the locked room alone, marooned His face in his hands— el rostro en sus manos unmasked * * * Yo te velaba, I am the lit candle at your feet, already mourning you,y tu también me velabas.All that happened before does not matter, now, in this room, as years pour over us, the sun sharpensthe walls, our outlines lit in this cleaving. * * * He leaves the mask on his pillow a catafalque then the mask speaks:"Beneath the black veil an orphan wanders the whitened fields of Argentina"Time stands still the candle stops quivering Father returnsto ask hijo, are you alright? Back then I didn't want to knowhis husky voice disguised …He brings a mirror from the afterlife hijo, mirá hay luz del otro ladodel túnel The mask reveals a face bone-white shell, lunar empty carapace, a husk alabaster, a shard. [End Page 12] * * * Your hands, which I loved,now a clutch of twigs, paper skin, galaxies of bruises.Bedside, I pray a rosary you would believe incounting no beads, but fingernails, evidence of our survival, mouthing words, rubbing the pads of my fingertips,smooth as polished stones, and your breath the ocean raking over those stones. * * * He crossed the ocean on a ship of fools inside the vessel a memory of what he'd left behind he traveled at nightheld a candle on his wooden cabin, a single bed he dreamt of rundown ports quays a murky river the intense heat of the subtropics a desolate wake filled with carnivorous flowers from far awaythe mask spoke again: look down at your own past his hands clasped in a cup—un amuleto smeared with mother's betún for an auspicious journey. * * * Sunlight and smoke coax things into visibility. You, at a distance, in a landscape I invented— and how that distance rendered us perfect, the dividing contour of the body no longer there. I thought it my job to find the plot, to create a list of things good and bad that could happen.But the story was in the telling, the details we chose to include. The moment I decided a castaway's raft was a better fate, as a bird flings itself into empty space, because the story can't end when the pain begins. [End Page 13] * * * Él, dentro de la casa que no era en ese continuo deshacerse underneath the rugs behind the commode by the heavy wardrobethere are books in Spanish que no volverá a leer golden spiders, trilobites house martins without southern magnets there is a photode cuando se despidieron en el aeropuerto… a distant airport days ancient dayswhen nothing much happened todo se va deshaciendo …Mask speaks to him: "Build a nest inside a hollow tree in the form of your father's body It'll take you a lifetime to complete it" * * * At home, you were the ghostthat haunted the doorway, a hunched figure in the corner of the living room, hooded and blending in with the furniture. You had to live in anothercontinent to feel our distance.Letters from a Buenos Aires apartment on Avenida Libertador, it was the most you'd ever written to me.I am still the reader of these pages, hunched over them, always, even when I look up. Mornings I'd find a spool of pages; how my fingerprintson the slick paper erased your words. I burned those words into my skull: bruising purple and orange solar flares. A cave to revisit, to study your words like...