> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Two Poems by Silvina López Medin - URL: https://hyperallergic.com/two-poems-by-silvina-lopez-medin/ - Published: 2019-11-13T12:00:32.000Z - Updated: 2025-11-24T16:39:15.000Z - Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected two poems by Silvina López Medin for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. - Author: Wendy Xu - Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:41 (2019, 2020, part 2) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/11/roy-de-carava-1.jpg) Roy DeCarava, “Hand and coat”(c. 1962), on view at David Zwirner 2019 (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino/Hyperallergic) ## I am writing this on my head, my hands inside gloves that don’t match I lose at least one from the pair per season and hold on to the other, that single glove left behind still contains the lost one. That is to say on the winter break I read Pascal Quignard, *in each image there’s a missing image*, says he, I add *in each sound there’s a missing sound*, say: my mother how she, because of her hearing impairment, is permanently reconstructing sentences from fragments, isn’t that writing? I am walking the nine blocks back home from the subway, it is -18 degrees and I’ll never know how to turn that into Fahrenheit or how at times I focus on something so much as to become something else. Gloves prevent us from breaking apart, gloves are not relevant in Buenos Aires this cold does not exist the kind that makes you turn not only your head but your whole body just to look at what’s coming. I did not write much back there, just brought a couple of summer images: my mother and I at night standing in front a white wall killing mosquitoes; my mother, my sons, I, in the backyard, hurrying to take away the clothes from the clothes line under light rain. ## April 17, 2019 *La memoria de un sonido* is the name of an old literary magazine my friend lends me. The memory of a sound. First issue of the two it lasted. Just two, like **a direct sound and its reflection**. Waves crashing against walls. Or a child running into a mother’s hard lap. — — — When you first realize that your parents are as abandoned as yourself, you are filled with terror, you start asking yourself who’s the caregiver here? says Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel in an interview in the magazine. — — — Scene: Exterior. Day. Veranda in Buenos Aires. February, 2012\. **My mother and I** sitting on a sofa, facing forward. She is talking about her eldest brother, who recently died in a car accident. “Those years my mother left me with my aunts, he was the only one that visited me.” She sobs, she’s split in half. She’s at her aunts’ house with her brother. She’s here at the veranda with me. I cannot hold the pieces. We’re facing forward, I cannot turn around. The sofa fabric is plastic, rigid, I can feel its pattern marking the backs of our thighs. — — — It was on February 21, 2012, almost one year since the birth of my eldest son. The phone rang, it was my mother’s voice saying “Enrique is dead. A bus ran over him. He did not hear the horn.” No introduction, no details, no real conclusion. A chain of facts, **broken, pieces scattered**. — — — My uncle’s hearing impairment was more severe than my mother’s. It was **hard** for him **to** articulate most sounds. It was sometimes hard for us to understand, not him, but the words coming from him. Yet he insisted, he did not mind parting words, repeating, asking back. Words would become more material, we could almost **touch** them. — — — In the interview, Martel goes on to speak about speech and time: when someone talks, they may use verbs in the present, past or future tense, this temporal quality of words dissolves the idea of consecutive, chronological flow. In this photo, there is a sepia layer of my mother **and** her brother in the 1950s, sitting close, though not holding each other. And then there is a red spot: the present tense of my mother’s nail polish, her fingers holding her phone to take a photo of the photo. Her **fingers holding** themselves. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/11/ma_y_enrique_crop_copy-1.jpg) Family photo, 1950s — — — Who’s the caregiver here? I must have thought sitting on the veranda sofa by my mother. I must have gotten **lost in the thought**, unable to act. — — — I wrote a poem about it. **A piece left out** of some past book. I won’t translate it from my native language, so you can at least read this, Mother. **Siesta** Nos dábamos la espalda ese sonido ahogado madre, qué era: por primera vez te escuchaba llorar, me quedé quieta apreté la almohada contra la oreja la almohada con el olor de tu pelo no pregunté no me di vuelta esperé que pasara pero crecía tu llanto entre las dos. Hicimos lo que pudimos, quedarnos cada una en su lugar y en algún momento dormirnos. \*\*\* *The interview mentioned is* *“La memoria de un sonido: Una conversación con Lucrecia Martel,” by Paula Jiménez España,* Al oído*, September, 2011, 4–11.* Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives in New York. She published three books of poetry: *La noche de los bueyes* (1999), which won the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize, *Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar* (2014), and *62 brazadas* (2015). Her chapbook *Excursion* was selected by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the 2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize and will be published by Oversound in 2020\. Her play *Exactamente bajo el sol* (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s [*Eros the Bittersweet* ](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780691632308?aff=hyperallergic&ref=hyperallergic.com)(2015) and *Home Movies* (2016), a selection of poems by Robert Hass, into Spanish. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.