spells

Those who fear the sorcerer neighbors
throw fistfuls of salt into the fire
when ominous birds pass by.
My graverobbing friends
find golden coins in dreams.
They wake to the lightning’s horseman
falling among them and turning to flame.

Midnight, Saint John’s Eve. The fig trees
dress for the party.
Echoes of animal cries
sunken for millennia in the marsh.
The chimalens gather the sheep
who’ve fled from their pen.
Dogs howl in the house of the miser
who wants to make a pact with the Devil.

I no longer recognize my house.
Inside the lights of ruined stars fall
like fistfuls of earth into a pit.
My friend keeps vigil in the mirror:
she’s waiting for the arrival of a stranger
announced by the longest shadows of the year.

At daybreak, barn owls nest in the mourning fig trees.
Sorcerers’ handprints dawn in the embers.
I wake with herbs and earth in my hands
from a place I’ve never been.

—

Originally published in Mercury Firs 7

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Jorge Teillier(Lautaro, Chile, 1935–1996) was a central figure of Chile’s Generación del 50 and the primary exponent of poesía lárica—a poetics of the hearth and homeland influenced by Rilke, East Asian lyric traditions, and the landscapes of southern Chile. In 1956, at just 21, he published his first book Para ángeles y gorriones, and went on to release a series of landmark collections—including Poemas del País de Nunca Jamás (1963) and Muertes y maravillas (1971)—establishing himself as one of Latin America’s most original lyric voices. Teillier remained in Chile throughout the Pinochet dictatorship, entering what he called “a time of roots,” living in semi-seclusion far from the capital. He died in 1996 and is buried in La Ligua under a gravestone that simply reads “Poet.” His books remain widely read and in print throughout the Spanish-speaking world. A newly-translated selection of his work is forthcoming from Song Cave in 2026.

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Sebastián Gómez Matus (Osorno, Chile, 1987) is a poet and translator based in Santiago. His firstbook Animal Muerto (2021), received honorable mention in the Juegos Florales Gabriela Mistral 2019, and in 2018 he won the Oscar Castro National Prize for Poetry for his Curso de Portugués (unpublished). His book Cómo Imaginé Bagdad y Cómo la Encontré was published last year in Mexico by Dharma Books Publishing. His published or forthcoming translations include Fin del Verano, by Chika Sagawa (2020); Mi Felicidad, Poemas escogidos (2021) by Mary Ruefle; El Descenso de Alette, by Alice Notley (2024); El Apocalipsis Árabe, by Etel Adnan (2024), and Las Lágrimas de Picasso, by Wong May (2025), among others. In the United States, translations of his work are published in Washington Square Review, Arkansas International, Firmament, and The Los Angeles Review. He works as a secondary-school literature and language teacher and contributes as a literary and cultural critic in various Chilean newspapers. He also works with Ka Collective of scenic arts as researcher and performer.

Sonnet R. Phelps(São Paulo, Brazil, 1998) is a translator and poet from Northern California, and now lives between California’s Bay Area and Providence, Rhode Island, where she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Brown University. She received two Bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley, spanning linguistics, the environmental humanities, geospatial data science, and creative writing. In 2024, she moved to Santiago, Chile, on a Fulbright research grant studying the relationships between translation and landscape in Cecilia Vicuña’s ecopoetics. She is the recipient of the Joan Lee Yang Memorial Poetry Prize and the Schola Cantorum Poetry Award, and has held artistic residencies in Valparaíso and San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Konch Magazine, Emergence Magazine, andWhitehot Magazine.