Mirror - Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

smarani makes prayer - Safia Elhillo

verily everything that is lost will be
given a name & will not come back
but will live forever

& verily a border-shaped wound will
be licked clean        by songs naming
the browngirl        in particular        verily she
will not heal but        verily the ghosts will
not leave her alone verily when asked how
she got her name        if telling the truth        she
will say        [a woman died        & everything
                                wants a home]


De: The January Children, University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

sem título - Ágnes Souza

As manchetes dos jornais dizem
os jovens não compram mais apartamentos

ou casas

não dá pra fazer isso quando mal se sabe

separar a clara da gema

tirar a gordura da panela sem prejudicar o teflon

quando não se sabe discernir

se foi beijo ou desespero.

In: Pouso, editora Moinhos

sem título - Ágnes Souza

Queria escrever um poema com a palavra "chegança"
aí te vi no meio da escada
me olhando e dizendo:
tava te procurando
e a chegança e o poema eram tu.

In: Pouso, editora Moinhos

Just the Two of Us - Tomioka Taeko

You'll make tea,
I'll make toast.
While we're doing that,
at times, early in the evening,

someone may notice the moonrise dyed scarlet

and at times visit us

but that'll be the last time the person comes here.

We'll shut the doors, lock them,

make tea, make toast,

talk as usual about how

sooner or later

there will be a time

you bury me,

and I bury you, in the garden,

and go out as usual to look for food.

There will be a time

either you or I

bury either me or you in the garden

and the one left, sipping tea,

then for the first time, will refuse fiction.

Even your freedom

was like a fool's story.

Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

de: Meditations in an Emergency, 1957, Grove/Atlantic

Mayakovsky - Frank O'Hara

1

My heart’s aflutter!

I am standing in the bath tub

crying. Mother, mother

who am I? If he

will just come back once

and kiss me on the face

his coarse hair brush

my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes

I guess, and walk the streets.

2

I love you. I love you,

but I’m turning to my verses

and my heart is closing

like a fist.

Words! be

sick as I am sick, swoon,

roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down

at my wounded beauty

which at best is only a talent

for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win

what a poet!

and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.

I embrace a cloud,

but when I soared

it rained.

3

That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest

oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks

what a funny place to rupture!

and now it is raining on the ailanthus

as I step out onto the window ledge

the tracks below me are smoky and

glistening with a passion for running

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Daddy - Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The Way It Is - Mark Strand

The world is ugly 

And the people are sad. 

—Wallace Stevens 

I lie in bed. 

I toss all night 

in the cold unruffled deep 

of my sheets and cannot sleep. 

My neighbor marches in his room, 

wearing the sleek 

mask of a hawk with a large beek. 

He stands by the window. A violet plume 

rises from his helmet's dome. 

The moon's light 

spills over him like milk and the wind rinses the white 

glass bowls of his eyes. 

His helmet in a shopping bag, 

he sits in the park, waving a small American flag. 

He cannot be heard as he moves 

behind trees and hedges, 

always at the frayed edges 

of town, pulling a gun on someone like me. I crouch 

under the kitchen table, telling myself, 

I am a dog, who would kill a dog? 

My neighbor's wife comes home. 

She walks into the living room, 

takes off her clothes, her hair falls down her back. 

She seems to wade 

through long flat rivers of shade. 

The soles of her feet are black. 

She kisses her husband's neck 

and puts her hands inside his pants. 

My neighbors dance. 

They roll on the floor, his tongue

is in her ear, his lungs 

reek with the swill and weather of hell. 

Out on the street people are lying down 

with their knees in the air, tears 

fill their eyes, ashes 

enter their ears. 

Their clothes are torn 

from their backs. Their faces are worn. 

Horsemen are riding around them, telling them why 

they should die. 

My neighbor's wife calls to me, her mouth is pressed 

against the wall behind my bed. 

She says, "My husband's dead." 

I turn over on my side, 

hoping she has not lied. 

The walls and ceiling of my room are gray— 

the moon's color through the windows of a laundromat. 

I close my eyes. 

I see myself float 

on the dead sea of my bed, falling away, 

calling for help, but the vague scream 

sticks in my throat. 

I see myself in the park 

on horseback, surrounded by dark 

leading the armies of peace. 

The iron legs of the horse do not bend. 

I drop the reins. Where will the turmoil end? 

Fleets of taxis stall 

in the fog, passengers fall 

asleep. Gas pours 

from a tri-colored stack. 

Locking their doors, 

people from offices huddle together, 

telling the same story over and over. 

Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back. 

Nothing is done. The night 

eats into their limbs 

like a blight. 

Everything dims. 

The future is not what it used to be. 

The graves are ready. The dead 

shall inherit the dead.

(Vídeo)

The Kiss - Anne Sexton

My mouth blooms like a cut.I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!

Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see — Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!

Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.

My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.

I cannot live with You (640) - Emily Dickinson

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone closer by —


They'd judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to —
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —

dor - Ledusha Spinardi

só quem não cabe

sabe

(Lua na jaula, 2018)

Naufrágio - Ana Martins Marques

De dentro da noite

a cidade

expele automóveis

sirenes cães inquietos

galos prematuros

mais longe

cheio de plantas que são pedras

que são flores que são bichos

o mar bate

contra a praia

em torno da cama

como de um navio partido

nossas roupas nossos cigarros

nossos livros afogam-se

a seco

(Da arte das armadilhas, 2011)

For Tess - Raymond Carver

Out on the Strait the water is whitecapping

As they say here. It’s rough and I’m glad
I’m not out. Glad I fished all day
on Morse Creek, casting a red Daredevil back
and forth. I didn’t catch anything. No bites
even, not one. But it was okay. It was fine!
I carried your dad’s pocketknife and was followed

for awhile by a dog its owner called Dixie.
At times I felt so happy I had to quit
fishing. Once I lay on the bank with my eyes closed,
listening to the sound the water made,
and to the wind in the tops of the trees. The same wind
that blows out on the Strait, but a different wind, too.
For awhile I even let myself imagine that I had died –
and that was all right, at least for a couple
of minutes, until it really sank in: Dead.
As I was laying there with my eyes closed,
just after I’d imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again
I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.

Falência - Raymond Carver

Vinte e oito anos, a barriga peluda saindo

por baixo da camiseta (isenta)

estou aqui deitado de lado

no sofá (isento)

e ouço o som estranho e agradável

da voz (também isenta) de minha mulher.

Nós somos novatos

nestes pequenos prazeres.

Perdão (rodo à Corte)

por termos sido imprudentes.

Hoje, meu coração, como a porta da frente,

está aberto pela primeira vez em meses.

(Esta vida, trad. Cide Piquet, 2017)

Pleno agosto - Fabrício Corsaletti

meus óculos de sol

minha cara de lua

— tem gente que tem uma máscara

tem gente que tem duas

minha avó usava blush

por cima da verruga

eu tive uma namorada

que tirava a roupa

e não ficava nua

o bigode cresce

ao contrário da peruca

minha amiga Beth Vargas

só gosta de carne crua

a poesia impede a vida

de virar literatura

o mal nasce com a pessoa

ou se aprende na rua

o mal nasce com a pessoa

a bondade custa

— meus óculos de sol guardados

e minha cara de chuva

(Esquimó, 2010)

O que eu quero de você - Fabrício Corsaletti

não quero voltar para casa

no seu abraço

não busco o que perdi

nunca pensei fazê-la cúmplice

da minha solidão

nem me passou pela cabeça

jogar sujo

com você —

você é o vento quente

que me acompanha

o enigma que não precisa ser decifrado —

de você eu quero apenas

um filhote de lobo

um filhote de lobo

para morder minha mão direita

quando eu estiver no escuro

depois que o amor acabar

(Esquimó, 2010)

Me sinto em casa - Ana Guadalupe

me mudei pela

sexta vez em seis anos

posso dizer com certeza

que me sinto em casa

posso não ter casa

mas tenho calçados

documentos com nome

são pedaços de casa

paredes se despedaçam

alguém se despede rápido

janelas despencam na brisa

eu me despeço sem graça

posso dizer

que sem sombra de dúvida

me sinto em casa

(Preocupações, 2019)

Lagarta na banana - Ana Guadalupe

quantas frutas serão por mim analisadas

com atenção em busca de lagartas

até o fim da vida

lembrando aí que esqueci de levar os óculos ao mercado

deve ser por isso também a tontura

cada volta na prateleira

é um zumbido novo nas orelhas

a vontade mista de ficar e ir embora

sei comprar ovos, brócolis, farinha

ainda não sei levar companhia

ir ao mercado sem ninguém é mais rápido

não é preciso esperar outra pessoa

hipnotizada olhando temperos ou chinelos

enquanto pães de centeio são por mim esmagados

enquanto encontro a lagarta que vive na banana

e jogo longe o cacho

(Preocupações, 2019)