The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Care Santos' "Dissection"

Care Santos

I’ll Love You for All Eternity

You take off a ring
(so simple, apparently)
and you free yourself of me.

I bought it in the usual place
on a dark afternoon
two winters ago.
I had it engraved with some words
I would’ve gotten tattooed on my skin
without resistance:
Te volam per omnia aevum.
A ring, you know, of white gold,
plain and simple. Perfect as only
true things are.
I didn’t care about the money
(I’ve have paid double)
because the real value of my gift
was in the words
that I wanted to be with you always,
Per Omnia Aevum.

I gave it to you at a tiny table
of a hamburger joint:
J. G. Melon’s (no cards accepted)
on the corner of 7th Avenue and 73rd.

In that simple place
I thought I saw the future start.

The ring shone between us,
all its blinding false glimmers,
but more than any of them the promise
I had just made you.
A challenge to time.
A light forever.
A simple inscription that proclaimed it:
Te volam per omnia aevum.
New York City, December, 2004.

You take off a ring
and the orphaned words
begin to erase themselves.
They dissipate as the fog
is lifted by the wind.
They rot, letter by letter,
like the leftovers
of a taxidermy.

From which one can conclude
(by way of a simple moral)
that should there be an occasion, in the future,
a tie would be better.

This selection comes from Care Santos’ book Dissection available now from A Midsummer Night’s Press. Purchase your copy here!

Care Santos (Mataró, 1970) is one of Spain’s most versatile and prolific writers. Writing in both Catalan and Spanish, she is the author of over 40 books in different genres, including novels, short story collections, young adult and children’s books, poetry, etc. She has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Ateneo Joven from Seville, the Alfonso de Cossío Short Story Prize, and in young adult literature both the Gran Angular Prize and the Barco de Vapor Prize, among many others. Dissection won the Carmen Conde Award for a book of poetry by a woman writer in 2007. Her novel Habitaciones cerradas was adapted into a television series. Her novel Desig de xocolata (written in Catalan) won the 34th Ramon Llull Prize and was translated into English by Julie Wark and published by Alma Books as Desire for Chocolate. Her work has also been translated into Basque, Galician, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, as well as English. She lives with her family in Mataró, Barcelona.

Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books as author or anthologist, including the Spanish-language poetry collection Desayuno en la cama and the English-language chapbooks Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names. He has won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), the Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. He lives in Madrid, Spain, where he works as a Spanish->English translator.

librecht baker. Dembrebrah West African Drum and Dance Ensemble member. Kouman Kele Dance and Drum Ensemble memeber. MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. VONA/Voices & Lambda Literary Fellow. Sundress Publications’ Assistant Editor. Poetry in Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices & CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape. Currently, birthing & manifesting.