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14 October 2024

Two Poems by José Buera

We're delighted to share two poems by José Buera to mark the publication of our our 40th Anniversary Issue, Wasafiri 119: Futurisms. These poems explore dystopian futures – and the tensions between humanity, alienation, and machine – through hauntingly beautiful descriptions.

Wasafiri 119: Futurisms is available to order now, or you can purchase the Wasafiri anniversary bundle, giving you deep insight into the history and trajectory of the magazine and literary landscape across four decades.


Sci Fi

The future is always blue
lights on eternal sleet,
cars just a box that hovers.

Yet no one has quit cigarettes,
all flames burn blue, methane
fires light the alien world —
android fluids green for contrast.

Does blood still run red or have we
merged with horseshoe crabs, mutated
bones light as hyacinth macaws?

IDs inside everyone’s heads, organic
matter fluxing official to teal-eyed avatars:
how many guanines in my code sequence
to be one of the chosen this time?

Earth’s turned ice white save for blue tarps
to warm cities, spread out like cheese mould:
underneath everything is possible — legal or not

as far as you are them and not us rebels
who seek change in the fear to feel
free. We will dress in navy, other colours
peddled in threes for a Cobalt half-coin

in the flea market, where depression
is the drug of choice to squander
a free will that was always decorative,

papered over cyan walls and billboards,
a glistening orphan star a second before
it disappears into an indigo shadow
by a door that opens to a binary ghost

its zeros and ones steal our agency and all
hope that life would stop with death,
a blue future worth an eternal wait.

 

Psychopomp

I am plumed in seared wings
secreted inside titanium,
skin oxidised white like the raw silk
of mesosphere spiders weaving
orbs into space songs.

I lay awake in ectoparasitic slumber,
hungry for gamma rays but instead
starve myself on a diet of sun dust,
neutrinos and preachers’ ignorance
of my profane roots.     

                                                                                        ME

I am an origami of one-fold
mutated Euclidian space
that curves to the vibrations
of distant tremblors that tingle
my neural nodes awake.

I dream of mourning fire,
collapsed stars the fatuous embers
that power my lateens with ancient light
to maroon me in the gravity of
this brightly lit blue planet.

Feed me earthquakes in kilotons.
Massage my desiccation cracks
with cluster bombs. Let a litany
of thermobaric combustions
judder in electromagnetic retorts.

Rearrange my concrete bones
like the petals of sand roses.
Breeze me like a wedge tornado
collapsing my multiplicities
into your stark-eyed lands.

YOU                                                                                               Interrogate me to confess
my hidden plains and seabeds,
a scorched counter-earth
peeled to its karakuri entrails
that begets but a single seed.

Fertilise this kernel with your blood
and watch it flower at midnight,
its pollen a pandemonium
of black holes that fall out on you
like burning summer snow.


Photo by Chris Rhoads on Unsplash

José Buera is a Caribbean and Latinx poet from the Dominican Republic. His poetry has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Konch, Magma, Wet Grain, and elsewhere.
Autumn 2024, 40th Anniversary
Wasafiri 119: 40th Anniversary Issue – Futurisms

Introducing our 40th Anniversary Issue — Wasafiri 119: Futurisms
 
This issue brings to the fore writers whose perspectives – on the present and on the future – have historically been sidelined. From alternative histories to critiques of the late-capitalist present; high fantasy, sci-fi and the posthuman; theories of landscape, the city, and the body; this milestone issue will showcase a branching network of writing on and around the power of persistence as resistance, as we continue to imagine into being futures that defy an increasingly oppressive present. 

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