False Ice Cream Shop / Falsa Heladería

By MARA PASTOR
Translated by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ

She asked me for an ice cream machine.
When she said it her collarbones were pronounced.
They were beginning to wilt,
but her skin was the flesh of coconut itself.
She wanted a machine to make ice cream,
to sell it in the neighborhood
and pay for the maintenance
of houses she no longer inhabits.
It didn’t matter that she had returned
from a post-war city.
To remodel the interiors of an Ottoman past.
Nothing mattered.
There was no work on this island.
I wish I could tell her:
“The ice cream machine will fix everything.”

//

Ella me pidió una máquina para hacer helado.
Cuando lo dijo tenía las clavículas pronunciadas.
Empezaban a marchitarse,
pero su piel era la carne misma del coco.
Quería una máquina para hacer helado,
venderlos en la urbanización
y así pagar el mantenimiento
de las casas que ya no habita.
Nada importó haber regresado
de una ciudad en postguerra.
Remodelar los interiores de un pasado otomano.
Nada importó.
No había trabajo en esta isla.
Yo quisiera decirle:
“La máquina de hacer helado lo arreglará todo”.

 

Mara Pastor is a Puerto Rican poet. Her works include the translated chapbooks As Though the Wound Had Heard and Children of Another Hour, and, in Spanish, Sal de Magnesio, Arcadian Boutique, and Poemas para Fomentar el Turismo. She lives in Ponce, Puerto Rico. 

María José Giménez is a poet, translator, and editor who has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment. Assistant translation editor of Anomaly, Giménez is the translator of Tilting at Mountains (Edurne Pasaban), Red, Yellow, Green (Alejandro Saravia), and As Though the Wound Had Heard (Mara Pastor). 

[Purchase Issue 16 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

False Ice Cream Shop / Falsa Heladería

Related Posts

For A Secret Grievance…

EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN
And it did indeed rival them. The large glass windows, the white marble display cases, the gleaming scales, the gilded brass taps, the wood-paneled ceiling, the banquettes lined with plush, green Utrecht velvet, the sparkling tins of canned food stacked in pyramids

Long wooden table with chairs. Plants in the background.

Four Ways of Setting the Table

CLARA CHIU
We are holding the edges of the fabric, / throwing the center into the air. / & even in dusk this cloth / billowing over our heads / makes a souvenir of home: / mother & child in snowglobe. / Yet we are warm here, beneath / this dome, & what light slips through / drapes the dining room white.

Contrail across blue sky

July 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by our Contributors

GEOFFREY BROCK
Sing, O furrow-browed youth, / of the contrails scoring the sky, / bright as lines of cocaine / until, as they age, the eye // loses them to the blue… / Sing of the thin-skinned plane / that made those ephemeral clouds, / and of all that each contains: // the countless faceless strangers