Diary of an Animal | Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
December 5, 2024
Originally published as “Bitácora de lo animal” in Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea (Ediciones Recodo, 2022). Translated from the Spanish by Georgia Phillips-Amos.
1986
Water is no longer water, it is millions of horses
microscopic and blue responding to the call of my skin:
In the bathtub chaos takes off
I rush with them
I withstand the thud of their hooves on my pores
other voices confused in the venomous task
outside
mother knocks on the door
mother is a shotgun
with animal wings
mother fires a cry for help.
How long?
The horse at my side breathes and says:
– the trembling of your hands is a side effect of the crash
of neonate planets, fear is not the way out –
horse gallops wild in this room my body
destroys viscera breaks bones and neighs the catastrophe
of the days that await me.
Every second of distance between your skin and my skin
pulls a mother cell from my belly:
this microcosmic pain is that benign child
we don’t wish to produce.
Child with two heads shivering in the house:
– Mama, what color are the hands of the father who
put me inside you? What color are the pupils which
you draw on the walls of my back? Mama, what
was your name before your crystalline metamorphosis?
Mama. . . –
Infinite questions to which I respond trembling.
The horse who lives in this room speaks and plays with him,
this unnatural love
is the one thing that sustains me.
I will glimpse your skin again when we return to being
Pangea:
Hundreds of horses from the south of America
and millions of black mediterranean horses
with ropes tied to the earth
will cross the Atlantic
dozens of buildings will fall
the horror will diffuse like a bloodstain
in my pupils
your continent and mine will be one
we will love one another in the midst of death
between split cadavers
you won’t be afraid anymore
of my blood
and my fluids
only in the midst of horror is love certain.
We will see the sun watching us
with rage
and laugh
I will have two broken legs
and you, an enormous mechanical hand
with which you will sustain me
in those infinite days left of Pangea
I repeat: only in the midst of horror is love certain.
My horse is a great two-metre long wound:
– Love is a form of madness – he tells me – you don’t
want to be crazy – he tells me – you want to be sane,
sanity is necessary – he tells me.
My horse is a wound that bleeds and beats, who is
blind and bangs against the walls of my bedroom; staining
the books, wrinkling their pages.
Soaking my clothes with blood and spit.
When and how will sleep settle beneath my eyelids?
I tie my hands to the thigh of this horse
so I can’t sketch you between the marks
left in the wake of its gallop
to not turn to plasma and drown myself here in this bed
where I hit you and peed on you more than once
– don’t do it – he tells me.
you’ll come back.
I carried señorita di Giorgio’s children
on my rump for six months without a single
reply:
I am an urban horse, I go down streets at top speed.
I drink beer on high terraces while the sun falls like
a grape on fire at the foot of the river. I am an urban horse,
divine equinity spinning morbidly from the kitchen
to the dining room
trying to forget your name, I face the night as
I am:
A horse who boils blood and viscera
with every movement
– they came to tell us that a horse
beautiful four-legged being
with crystal horns
last traveller of the universe
would live among us –
I want to remember before love traversed my
blood what colour my lungs were as a girl
in a battle field beneath my plexus before
your sacred salt slept in my stomach for that I listen
to the call of the flowers
each one of my legs knew it was certain from above
a ray would travel quickly through my celestial body
to the mouth of this zoomorphic river . . to the mouth.
We have lost count of the times that we have
had to pick our bones up off the sidewalk.
We have lost count of the times that we have
eaten one another. We have digested our meats
and set a cannibal banquet beneath the bed:
For centuries
this four-legged and exquisite animal
accompanies my days
its sonorous step
heavenly percussion
hits my temples
love spreads in the city.
We don’t want to be saved
We want nothing more than a hybrid of our
walking with the open wound neighing
at the top of his lungs
before this body of water where your face is drawn.
Horse throws small stones which fall on your face.
Horse asks why I don’t swim around you.
Horse is a time bomb.
I imagine your body erect and your moles
like small constellations stuck to you since your
birth.
I imagine your pupils like Icelandic lakes where
hundreds of dogs and golden birds cut their throats. I imagine
your hair like an intergalactic field of wheat capable
of calming the hunger of the town which inhabits me.
Burning my cranium will not suffice.
Letting Horse eat my eyes will not suffice.
I look at you in the river for the last time before offering myself to
the task and becoming food for the hopeless who
then forget my name.
Like this
this way only
will the amnesia be annihilated.
It runs away over my men.
onethousandninehundredvioletandtwo
– to my parents
When they conceive us
does the catastrophic idea of uninhabited home
automatically grow inside the newly gestated cell?
When does the divine idea of adhering to another cell
install itself in this cell?
I started to grow in a belly
of rays starting in nineteen thousand violet and two
like one who plants a cypress without finding out that it is true
that this tree will grow without root
adhered to an irreconcilable earth
one thousand ninehundred violet and two
a purple wound
a breath never drawn.
They didn’t know
that the prolonging of their desire
would last an eternity
that horror
like a shadow
would always accompany them
like a drawn-out beat in a body
on the verge of necrosis
tormenting them.
What was your no face like in ninehundred
eighty and always, óscar?
What was the last word yours said to you
before adhering you to the planet?
Before planting you forever on the other side of this ocean
which destroys me
óscar
that is your name
I want to stop hiding you
under cover of this charlatan tongue
I want to allow myself and feel certain and real
beyond the territory of this new white universe
of black flashing signs.
I want to reinvent your name
and your birth
that your birth becomes my unnameable day
like the light that pours from a deer as it collapses
over a cliff
over the shoulder of your root.
Yours like mine,
didn’t know the desire would last so long
Where is our time, óscar?
In which divine river do they keep the latex
and urine spilled from my
post-adolescent and wild-horse belly?
Why don’t we invent a language
that the stones might understand
to save us?
Where do my skins go
with your fingerprints
on my pores?
Outside this lie
we remain truthful.
Loving you are millions of brains
hanging from that rack:
– don’t look at them –
Horse doesn’t understand this thirst is timeless
and measures the same as our galaxy
and there is no universe in which we can both fit.
I want to cut off my extremities
to put them meticulously
in a backpack
as mere demonstration of hunger
as indelible proof of my capacity
to shatter myself
crossing the Atlantic like a corpse
the fear has barely cut my face
and my tongue
– don’t listen and don’t look –
I can’t help but obey.
Horse can’t bring on my tears,
though he could destroy by cranium with his hoof
a few centimetres away.
Horse is offended by our lack of tact.
The cries I let out burst eardrums.
He is a steed of bones and limbs in a state of
decomposition
symptoms of accumulated contempt.
Violence is the most highly valued food in these
nauseating instances:
because of this I lie on the carpet over the skins
and nails of those already destroyed
then horse runs over my flesh.
I regret a thousand times having seen myself born
in all those eyelids
minefield of stars that squawk my name.
I open my mouth to be born again
as I do every morning
after serving myself as a meal.
I am born:
I celebrate my bones like a macabre carnival
where they break the altars I edified in your name
I split myself into four equal pieces
I piece myself together
against the glass and dust of this desolate city:
I am not human
I don’t have another tool but the cry and the fishing
of my lost selves
in all the buildings where I fearlessly broke
my occipital bones
because the light didn’t reach me, all this light in just one cranium:
I am not human
I cling to this divine equinity like a newborn
its mother’s breast exploding in its pallet
I cling to the horse that leaves through this mouth with me:
crib of all battles
I bury myself in skin and still-unraveling nerves
between the hairs
of this beast galloping me galloping itself:
I am not human
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano (b. 1992, Esmeraldas) is an Ecuadorian poet and writer. She obtained her bachelor’s in Literature at Universidad de las Artes (Guayaquil, Ecuador) and has published Botica (Ediciones Recodo, Quito, 2021), Canciones desde el fin del mundo (Libero Editorial, Madrid, 2021), Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea (Ediciones Libros del Cardo, Valparaiso, 2021; Ediciones Recodo, Quito, 2022; Amuauta&Yaguar, Buenes Aires, 2022), Fiebre de carnaval (La Navaja Suiza, Madrid, 2022; Ediciones Recodo, Quito, 2022) y Litorales (Ediciones Recodo, Quito, 2023).
Georgia Phillips-Amos is a writer, editor, teacher and translator who grew up in Málaga, Spain, and New York City. She writing on art and literature appears in magazines and academic journals. She is a founding editor of O BOD.
