Scourer

Written by Dolores Miquel Abella

Translated from the Catalan by Kristine Doll

Narrated by Kristine Doll

Spain

With the roughness of a green scouring pad, green like a meadow, I scour, while my jaw tries to grip your name inside my cranial cavity, which is already full of names, and on top of the names, stones, and on top of the stones, continents, and on top of the continents, the necropolis of stars, when an intense rain clears everything away and wets my lips so that I speak and I speak and I speak. And no more keeping quiet.

So I scour, I scrub until I bleed and from my blood are born rocks with a heart locked inside. And from my mouth a name falls out that rolls to where horses lick the shadows of birds that cannot fly.

Dolors Miquel Abellà is a Spanish poet, translator, thinker, rhapsodist and a staunch defender of Nature and animals. She was born in a city with a river, on the edge of a hill where storks and other birds nest, in 1960 during the Franco dictatorship. She now lives near the sea. She is a defender of culture, believing that the notion of “human” cannot exist without it and that there is nothing that generates more fear than men without culture or those who, possessing it, are Nazis or fascists. She believes in equality, without any restriction by gender or sexual orientation. She has published numerous books of poetry and has written a single play that was performed at the Grec Festival in Barcelona. She has been awarded prizes and has recited her poetry both domestically and internationally.

Kristine Doll is a poet and translator (English/Spanish/Catalan).  She teaches at Salem State University in Salem MA.  Her work has been published domestically and internationally in such venues as Asymptote, The Seventh Quarry, Cross-Cultural Communications Art & Poetry Broadside Series, The Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Loch Raven Review, and Immagine & poesia.  Her most recent translation from English into Spanish is the book of aphorisms written by Carolyn Kleefeld, Soul Seeds/Semillas del alma (Cross-Cultural Communications and Edicions Saldonar, 2021).