Poetry
Anonymous Biography
I’m a dark citizen
abandoned in the middle of the streets
by the knife without bread at noon,
homeless and withering away
like the steeple clocks,
with no other job except to wander among disguises.
I’m the relative in decline,
rooted in the taverns
and the complicity of thieves.
My voice shipwrecks on store windows.
and I’ve lost my sight in the newspapers.
But I have my feet firmly planted on the earth
and a pillow that flies through the hospitals
and rooms in the dark home that belongs to no one.
I’ve got a nice cell in the police stations
and I’m used to dancing in secret beneath the night
with my white shirt
and my tie stripped of its leaves.
I’m a dark citizen
misplaced by the world:
I pick up cigarette butts
and sing in the streetcars,
and I comb back my hair, valiantly,
to show my noble anonymous forehead
in the public bathrooms and circuses where I live.
I’m a dark citizen; I’m no one;
nothing distinguishes me from some other citizen;
I have grandmothers and relatives who’ve gone away
and a wide back digging
under the friendly walls of the beer halls.
I’m a wave among all the waves,
a wave that rises
at six in the morning because it can no longer
smell the dust in its house,
a wave, lifting itself, filled with joy,
toward the beaches
for an endless return to the center of things
where all the waves
push each other-
sterile and alone.
Because I am not worthy of my semen,
Lord, I’m nothing;
I’m in the middle of the streets
spinning like an organ grinder
with my worn, immovable shirt,
watching the tips of my shoes
in case someone wants to give me
a coin I don’t want,
even though no one has seen me go by
this afternoon or ever,
because I’m never anyone,
not even a dark citizen
brought back to life by hunger.
My voice has died in the store windows,
and my mouth is filled with surf, I’m drunk,
because I’m a wave among all the waves,
who comes to die on this sand of misery,
decently, with a flannel suit
and a blind tie
like the good man I was.
I was once a dark citizen,
Lord, don’t tell anyone,
and unemployed, that’s right!
So, this is where life ends up,
but remember after all:
I never asked for anything
because I had a white shirt.
In memory of Armando Rubio, who died in chile in 1980, at age 24. –Raymundo Rubio
Translation by Steven F. White, from Poets of Chile (1986), by permission of R. Rubio.
Contributor
Armando Rubio
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Citizen Ghost: David Fincher's Mank
By Madeleine SeidelDEC 20-JAN 21 | Film
David Fincher's latest, Mank, an iconoclastic biopic of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, proves that courageous, subtle, and smart filmmaking about Hollywood is still possibleand still able to expose the rot at the core of the industry.

Living Through History: ABSCONDED #EjectionDay2020
By Noa WeissDEC 20-JAN 21 | Dance
As the slow crawl of ballot counting across America began on November 3, Dragonfly/Robin Laverne Wilson performed her own crawl through the streets of New York. Dressed as a statue of fugitive slave Ona Maria Judge Staines, the artist summons the power of a living monument.
Gendering Biography
By Stephanie SiuFEB 2020 | Books
There are aspects of a persons life that arent subject to opinion: age, country of birth, or the manner of their death. Within the murkier, subjective areas is where the historian's prowessand prejudicemay lurk. While Weller elucidated Carrie Fishers inner world, Mosers mansplaining of Susan Sontag reveals more about him than his subject.
Freedom Dreaming
By Rujeko HockleyDEC 20-JAN 21 | Critics Page
In your words, another earlier world was given weight and dimension, made real. The world into which you were born a third-class citizen, a girl child of the Black majority violently swept aside and under the boot of Cecil John Rhodes and his grasping descendants.