Inside the House


why did it have to stop raining?
James Schuyler, “The Morning of the Poem”

It rises, vertically, to the top of the pine.
Where it flutters its wings in silence, perched.
Rain. The pacifier back to the fretful mouth.
With or without an audience, the acting is the same
–which is to say, it’s almost an attitude.
The show starts at any hour,
the hours are valid only
when announced by that
little yellow

To be honest: at home I strip away
that good old cynicism, leave it
aside, empty and folded like
a wool suit
in disuse.

Wide pleats.

At 24, I tightened my bathrobe,
I sat at the table
before a couple of dictionaries
and told myself:

Eleven years later.

Squash makes
his fourth solid food.

The bench in the plaza: three old ladies
shade themselves.
They hold before their eyes
the supermarket coupon booklets
They sit in profile and chat
that way, with their arms outstretched.
The one in the middle tilting to one side
and to the other
The rest of the plaza is pure sun.

One must have slept little and poorly
to be in the condition
to perceive this moment exactly as it is.

They’re coming back,
all those children’s stories,
everything is brought to justice,
nothing is picturesque, no more fodder for poetry.
The parents are the accused
and they seem guilty,
already we’ve begun
to seem guilty.

I just noticed
that rattle is a penguin!

I get lost in connotations,
doubt the existence
of words; the same thing happens
with the recognizability of certain faces.
On the other side of the door
my son is learning everything
and the water is boiling over.

Coke fizzing
in a glass
in the dark.

in the clutches of instinct–
that’s how
I work.

A detour, like when
a preposition doesn’t work
for saying things a different way
although the first worked just fine.
You can also
with the body.

Bye-bye, train!

I want my life to be impossibly simple.
I didn’t come up with that myself; it’s a quote.


Laura Wittner

Laura Wittner lives in Buenos Aires. Her books of poetry include El pasillo del tren (Trompa de Falopo, 1996), Los cosacos (Ediciones del Diego, 1998), Las últimas mudanzas (Vox, 2001), La tomadora de café (Vox, 2005), Lluvias (Bajo la luna, 2009), Balbuceos en una misma dirección (Gog y Magog, 2011), and La altura (Bajo la Luna, 2016). Her work has also been included in the anthologies Noche con posibilidades (Civiles iletrados, 2011), Por qué insistimos con los viajes (Ediciones Liliputienses, 2012/2017), and Jueves, noche (Bokeh, 2016). She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, conducts poetry and translation workshops, and works as a translator for various editorials. She has translated work by Leonard Cohen, David Markson, Anne Tyler, James Schuyler, and others into Spanish, and she also writes children’s books, mostly recently Eso no se hace (Limonero, 2015) and Veo Veo – Conjeturas de un conejo (Tres en Línea 2015). She can be found at

Shira Rubenstein

Shira Rubenstein was born in upstate New York and has lived in the United States, Costa Rica, Chile, and Argentina. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Brandeis University. Her poems and translations have been published by OOMPH! Press, Window Cat Press, and La hoja itinerante (Valparaíso, Chile). She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon.

Dentro de casa. Copyright (c) Laura Wittner, 2005. English translation copyright (c) Shira Rubenstein, 2017.