Synkroniciti is stoked to welcome poet Brian Duran-Fuentes from Mexico City, now residing in Dallas, TX. We present “Corvus morbidi” in dual language format, Spanish followed by English, alongside Cuervo by Mexican painter Mercedes Marin Giménez. Artist and poet have worked together before in ekphrastic collaboration and their work has natural, mystical and primal notes in common. We will have more about Cuervo in Mercedes Marin Giménez’s artist feature in early 2025. The poem describes a dreamy, vaguely nightmarish vision of a murder of crows: “Their metallic beaks shine/ as they drink on the still water./ How they poison their own insides,// how they wet their feathers,/ with the slow tears of the agave”. There is a sense of the ominous and ineffable–how life slowly poisons and kills all things, both earthly and cosmic. Brian creates a musical style that begs to be read aloud. Though the inflection and the patterns of alliteration are different, we feel the incantational quality strongly in both languages. It is a spell-bindingly beautiful work, a subdued haunting that plays at the edge of horror. Brian shows us a microcosm/macrocosm analogy based on earthly nature and its relationship to the universe rather than one centered on humanity.
Read “Corvus morbidi” alongside Cuervo in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Brian Duran-Fuentes was born and raised in Mexico City. He usually dwells in liminal spaces or rants at open mics hosted by dive bars in Dallas, Texas. He will not shut up about the new Grendel’s Sÿster album. His work has appeared in several publications including Oyez Review, Ravens Quoth Press, Hiperbole Frontera, Wicked Shadow Press and Revista Paladín. His debut chapbook Thank you for Shopping at Secgens came out this year through Alien Buddha Press, and his second book, Laúsfera, is coming out through Editorial Adarve in January.