A LATIN AMERICAN SONNET 44
by Leo Boix
Like the dusty Archive of America’s First Planetarium,
with its small sundials, rare telescopes and pocket globes,
or the Global Seed Vault, a giant underground aquarium
buried deep on an island between Norway and the North Pole.
Like the gargantuan Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City,
with its Aztec calendar– the Stone of the Sun– and the tombstone
and jades of Pakal. Like the Gold Museum of Bogotá City,
packed with necklaces, bracelets and trunks, room after room.
So, my own museum grows every day in this English diaspora,
a collection of objects acquired (who knows) to tell my story;
letters from Argentina, stones, books, photos from a lost camera,
and all the things you gave me as presents, a gay love’s allegory.
Sometimes, I wander through those corridors, long and intricate,
looking at my past, my two countries– a diorama for an immigrant.
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives and works in the UK. His first collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix’s second English collection Southernmost: Sonnets, is forthcoming with Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House) in June 2025. He has also authored two poetry collections in Spanish, Un Lugar Propio (2015) and Mar de Noche (2017), published by Letras del Sur Editora, Argentina. He has translated many Latin American poets into English, including Diana Bellessi, José Watanabe, Cecilia Vicuña, Oscar David López, Liliana Ancalao and Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Boix is the editor of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (fourteenpoems, 2025). He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award, the Keats-Shelley Prize, a PEN Award, The Society of Authors’ Foundation and K. Blundell Trust, as well as been twice long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, run by the UK-based Poetry Society.