Leisure.

<TN>Lott, Olivia</TN>

 Since everyone has had that feeling
when eating Chinese
or will
sooner or later.
Since there are ridiculous,
sad,
ways of abandonment
and one,
no less sad,
sensation of coming to an end,
here
where nothing
seems thrilling any more:
lobsters jammed in tiny
fish tanks,
trains of people pushing ahead
without the elegance of the Japanese
and so many other fallouts
preceded
by forms of overcrowding.
Since anyone who grew up
in a market
knows that there are unusable things
three or four in the afternoon
and clocks from a time
that only gets by as an enemy,
and an hour when they drop
onto the counter:
sun
heat
and nonsense,
here,
where ginger stalks,
like freakish molars,
and a giant pumpkin,
exposed to anything,
warn that something's about to happen.
But no.
Since the street is full of folks
looking for exotic
fruit,
folks who can leave it all behind
but nothing
empty,
people who wander around
and trample time
like dry leaves.
But in the midday line
eight hundred million Chinese
dream different dreams
and in between the cracks
--believe it or not--
a girl
sleeps
without burden.
If someone finds out,
there's a chance
they'll wake her up.
We know that leisure is the mother of
   all greed.

Translations from the Spanish

By Olivia Lott

Andrea Cote Botero (b. 1981, Colombia) is the prizewinning author of the poetry collections Puerto calcinado (2003) and La ruina que nombro (2014). She is also a translator of poetry from English into Spanish and is currently assistant professor of poetry in the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas, El Paso.

Olivia Lott's translations of Colombian poetry have appeared most recently in Mantis, Rio Grande Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, And Waxwing.