Xaviera Ringeling

Xaviera Ringeling is a Chilean bilingual poet residing in London since 2012. Her poetry in Spanish was awarded the 2019 New Voices prize by the feminist publishing house Torremozas in Spain. Her first poetry book, Alba, was published in October 2019 by El Ojo de la Cultura, in the UK and is reviewed in the online literary magazine Perro Negro. She participated in the anthology Leyendo Poesía in London and her poetry in English has been published in the Greenwich Poetry Workshop Pamphlet: The Tide Turns and in the online magazine Perro Negro. She funded the poetic collective Poesía Pandémica and is an active member of the workshops Greenwich Meantime and Greenwich Poetry. Xaviera holds a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Católica de Chile and an MSc in Environmental Politics from UCL. She was born in Paraguay, lived in Ecuador and Bolivia as a child, and resided in New York and Boston during her studies. Xaviera works as a Spanish teacher and an environmental researcher in London.

With the hands

Absence clusters love into fingers
that with infinite care hold the belonging, the photo,
the remains found under the salt of the Atacama.
And this homeless love, having lost shelter in the beloved’s body,
is brought through the tenderness of the hands

to the traces, to the shadows, to the silhouettes.
And it’s as if the dead are cradled between fingers
bestowed of company in their last solitude.
And it’s as if the dead are coddled between fingers
that calm the throbbing of fever,

caressing with fingertips
their aching gulfs.
Conversing with silence,
pronouncing pending affections.
Loving with the hands what cannot be touched.