Kristin Dykstra—A Skunk Made Itself Known To Us

A skunk made itself known in the night. Its pawprints too. Again the slush, top-down, passed off as the face of the partitioned people, generally speaking, squeaking, it skips, another face obscured in the space between. Resembling your dignity. Are we sick yet? Sequence, no, a no sequence, in non sequitur. When a you, as a form, has to start in and out of a deep. A non, the dark. Or the motionless light of some day. Out of its stillness, say, everything else was walking.

Kristin Dykstra appears in the June 2020 Words Without Borders Translator Relay. Selections from her new poetry manuscript are forthcoming in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion and Seedings. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Cuban writer Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also brought out the 2019 collection Materia Prima, a Finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award, co-edited by Dykstra with Kent Johnson. Introducing Amanda Berenguer of Uruguay, Materia Prima features a team of eight co-translators. Jacket2 published her alphabetical commentary series, “Intermedium,” in 2015.