When everyone leaves for other planets
I’ll stay in the abandoned city
drinking a last cup of beer
and then I’ll go back to the town I always go back to
like the drunk to the tavern
and the boy to go riding
on the broken seesaw.
And in town I won’t have anything to do,
other than put fireflies in my pockets
or walk along the rusted edges of the rails
or sit at the weathered shop counter
and chat with old classmates.

Like a spider who traverses
the threads of her own web
I will walk without hurry along the streets
invaded by weeds
looking at the collapsing dovecotes
until I get to my house
where I’ll shut myself in to listen
to records of a singer from 1930
without ever caring to look
at the infinite paths
that rockets trace in space.



               - translated by Sonnet R. Phelps and Sebastián Gómez Matus

Jorge Teillier (Lautaro, Chile, 1935–1996) was a central figure of Chile’s Generación del 50. He was a 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)—that established him as one of Latin America’s most original lyric voices. Teillier remained in Chile throughout the civic-military dictatorship, entering what he called “a time of roots,” living in semi-seclusion far from the capital. Though he received high praise from contemporaries such as Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño, critical recognition of his work was muted during his lifetime, and he is long overdue for a contemporary reappraisal. He died in 1996, and is buried in La Ligua, Chile, under a gravestone that reads simply “Poet.”

Sonnet R. Phelps is a writer and translator from Northern California. Her writing and translations have appeared in Emergence Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and Mercury Firs, among others, and she has held artistic residencies in Valparaíso and San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. She recently spent a year living in Santiago and Valparaíso, Chile, as a Fulbright research fellow, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Sebastián Gómez Matus is a poet and translator whose books of poetry include Animal muerto (Aparte, 2020), which received mention in the Juegos Florales Gabriela Mistral 2019; Po, la constitución borrada (2021); Cómo imaginé Bagdad y cómo la encontré (Dharma Books Publishing, 2023) for  which he received the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y los Artes (CNCA) grant for Poetry in Chile. As a translator, he has published full-length collections by Chika Sagawa, Zachary Schomburg, Mary Ruefle, Alice Notley, Etel Adnan, Wong May and Terrance Hayes, among others. He received the Looren Translation House grant in 2023, participates in the KA Collective of scenic arts, and currently lives in Valparaíso, Chile, working as a teacher and literature & poetry critic.