“What is it? Am I more beautiful when I wear a gown of suffering? Or maybe you think I’m more yours when you grind my flesh and soul in your ever-turning mills. Does my sweetness lie so deep within me you need to cut me to find it? And what do you want with my sweetness, anyway, if all the honeycombs open for you alone, if all the honey is yours even before the bees sip it from the flowers?”
— Dulce María Loynaz, from “Poem LXXXIII,” trans. James O’Connor, Absolute Solitude: Selected Prose Poems (First Archipelago, 2016)



















