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I will recover such hours: we pick blackberries, for example,
and gather them in buckets
strung to our hips. The sun backs off slowly
with its hands in the air, like a culprit. Then
the smell of wet dirt, in the conditional
perfect tense. This could be so. This is all,
the famous Latin American poet wrote to my adolescence. In the distance,
someone is singing. In the distance. In the evening, we take our shirts off
while the berries bleed out in our mouths. I hear their cries,
made in a dialect indiscernible
from the twilight. When you run through the fruit we reaped,
a countryside amounts between us. We push
on it, as if pushing on a block
of time—we push on it. Here’s a fistful of black
with frost inside. Here’s a mentality I made for you
to keep the pain away. Another deft translation
of my father’s word for winter. It sounds nearly
like hell, a burning. And the hottest flame is blue
and feels cold when it is touched.

Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo is a writer of poetry and nonfiction. His work can be found in The Yale Review, the New York Times, Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern, and The Believer, among other venues. At present, he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.