Miriam Reyes is a Spanish poet, performer and video artist.

Though born in Galician town Ourense, she grew up in Caracas (Venezuela) since she was 8 years old. She studied at Universidad Central de Venezuela and she’s Bachelor of Arts on Hispanic Philology and Master on Teaching Spanish as second language by Universitat de Barcelona (Spain). Besides Spain and Venezuela, she has lived in The Netherlands and Jordan. She’s currently residing in Barcelona, Spain.

Reyes has published six poetry collections in Spain and one in Argentina. Her poems have been translated to languages such as Portuguese, Italian, English, and Serbo-Croatian. She co-directs the publishing house Marisma. She has edited and translated into Spanish Galician, Portuguese and Catalan Contemporary Poetry.

From the year 2000 she combines her written poetry with photography, performance, new technologies and video.

The river is a brown god they say

of its divinity I only see

water and earth dragged by the water

beneath my bed the brown god insinuates

that my house is not a paper boat

a question of folds

parked beside the river my bed

is not proof against wolves nor floods

no architect planned my home

without walls that block the light from me

with views of the brown god cardboard and rheumatoid arthritis

could be your bed suddenly

suddenly one day I woke and there was the river

with that color of mud of sewers of brown god

and my joints and bones howling to it

my old home was wolfproof

all brick up to the ceiling

lovely it didn’t protect me from anything

before I was elsewhere and now I‘m here

with the river that whispers to me every night

its catfish its sinkholes its drowned

(the wolves are not interested).

Translated into English by Lawrence Schimel