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Poem-a-day

Wheel of Fortune

translated from the Galego/Spanish by Samantha Schnee

There are women who, upon the bright star 
of each twenty-eighth day,
receive a stream of liquidity in their accounts, 
endometrial or financial,
a blessed
            hemorrhage of cash.

I, on the other hand, have
a costly hypothesis:
each menstrual cycle is one of pointless nostalgia—
a broken necklace of infinitesimal un-births
not this one, or this one, or this other one, or that one …
all those cells waiting just to rush
headlong into dying so easily, 
my embryonic failures, I 
build a nest to curl up close with them
I’m left alone and, softly, I whisper to my ovaries:
Couldn’t you               
                       produce
                                  something more useful?

I swallow a pill
and make haste to desecrate myself.

 


 

A Roda Da Fortuna

 

Hai mulleres que, co luceiro de cada día vinte oito,
báixalles un caudal de liquidez ás súas contas,
endometrio ou salario,
unha bendita
                     hemorraxia de billetes.

A min, porén, píngame
unha gravosa hipótese
—cada ciclo menstrual é unha inútil nostalxia—
ábreseme un colar de diminutos abortos
este non, este tampouco, nin este outro, nin este ...
todos eses xermes facendo quenda para precipitarse
intentando morrer e non lles custa
meus embrionarios fracasos, eu
fago un niño para me recostar con eles
quedo a soas e, en baixiño, besbéllolles aos meus ovarios:
non podedes
                         segregar
                                          algo máis produtivo?

Trago unha pastilla
e corro a abusar de min mesma.

Copyright © 2025 by Yolanda Castaño. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Yolanda Castaño

Yolanda Castaño
Photo credit: Alberto Pombo
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About Poem-a-Day

Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year. Randall Mann is the Guest Editor of August. Read or listen to a Q&A with Mann about his curatorial process, and learn more about the 2025 Guest Editors. Support Poem-a-Day.  

If you have any questions about Poem-a-Day, visit our Poem-a-Day FAQ.

Previous Poems

Title Author Date
In a Grain of Sand Jesús Papoleto Meléndez 12/11/2024
The Talking Coconut Ed Morales 12/10/2024
Fantasy Tennessee Reed 12/09/2024
Lament Rainer Maria Rilke 12/08/2024
A Casualty List Mary Carolyn Davies 12/07/2024
My Apologies Ammiel Alcalay 12/06/2024
How Some of Us Survived Cuando El Mundo Did Not Want Us Emanuel Xavier 12/05/2024
A Cuban Modernist in Miami Adrian Castro 12/04/2024
A Black Genius Ishmael Reed 12/03/2024
In the Beginning, There was the Light Felix Cortes 12/02/2024

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