The Pink Plastic Glove

Written by Dolors Miquel Abella

Translated from the Catalan by Kristine Doll

Narrated by Kristine Doll

Spain

A pink plastic glove arrives, I say hello pink plastic glove, you have come. If you have come it is because someone has sent you, someone who knows the price of bread and milk and useful things. Someone who thinks of me and sends you. Someone who thinks: a dead man has been found in the sink, someone who knows what life can be. Someone who understands what my life is already. An exceptional being. A being who has not gone to any school. A being who thinks of me and who knows that what I need is not a Bible, not a register or an electoral list or a wedding list, but a pink plastic glove. Not a signifier but a glove. Not a signifier but a Rose. The pink tutu over the slender, muscular legs of the swan ballerina of the Moscow ballet. And above all the idea of ​​getting inside the glove. The armor of the glove. The soul entering into the glove and the body entering into the soul. If this someone knows the way out, he should say so. Say, for example, you walk straight ahead, and you turn three hundred light years to the right and then you move to the north pole of the first magnitude magnetized, and there you cross through the kitchen door, you take the apron, the scouring brush, the mask of Santa Ana de Teloxtoc where you can still see the nose, the parts of the mouth and the jaw. And you start the ritual. As the kings and priests of ancient times did, you begin with a vestal virgin watching you, you begin it.

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).