*
Mineral flora we enter
to seize fruits of transparent taste.
Days that pass in the empty hollow of a great eye.
A sudden silence would shatter the crystals.
A transfusion of sap in autumn
would provoke the descent of the hands.
*
The ocean is a boy nursed by whales,
the sky a great eyeball from which rain falls;
the light a sound that crumples in the sand,
powdered sailing ship
from which a dawn departs with every wave.
The breeze is a bird wrapped in a handkerchief;
man the thirsty water
where forever we drown ourselves.
*
The man tied up in nets of wind,
in the loose hairs of his pencil!
The man turns to dreams like one returning to his homeland,
the stars conversing with the axons of his neurons!
To be both other and himself.
*
The great tongue of sand that licks your feet:
before the open jaws at the end of the earth,
before the waves—your organs of flight—
as the seagulls, which carry
snow from other planets in their wings.
—
Augusto Lunel was a Peruvian poet, born either in 1923 or 1925, as either Augusto Gutiérrez or Augusto Sánchez del Ottre (accounts vary). In the 1950s he moved to Mexico City, where he became associated with the city’s literary and cultural elite as part of the transnational neovanguardista movement of the mid-century. His first book, Los Puentes (1955), was published in Mexico with illustrations by Leonora Carrington. By the early 1970s, Lunel had moved to France—by some accounts, he stayed in Paris, by others he went south. His second book, Espejos Paralelos, was published in Lima in 1971. He is perhaps most famous for the first line of his untitled manifesto, which was frequently invoked by novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa: “Estamos contra todas las leyes, empezando por la ley de la gravedad” [“We are against every law, beginning with the law of gravity”]. According to Vargas Llosa, Lunel was also, at one point, the bodyguard for Charles de Gaulle, though there is little evidence for this claim.
Michael Martin Shea is the author of multiple chapbooks of poetry, including To Hell With Good Intentions (Beautiful Days Press, 2024) and I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault (Essay Press, 2025). He is also the translator of Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream (World Poetry Books, 2025). His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, jubilat, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.