THE USUAL SUSPECTS
LEZAMA LIMA’S PEN
TO BE OR NOT TO BE OF PLASTIC
Rosa Alice Branco is a poet, essayist, and translator. She has published twelve volumes of poetry, including Cattle of the Lord, which won the prestigious 2009 Espiral Maior de Poesia Award. Her most recent books are Live Concert (& etc, 2012) and To Trace a Name in the Heart of Whiteness (Assirio & Alvim, 2018). She has published two books of essays, What Prevents the World from Becoming a Picture and Visual Perception in Berkeley. Her work has been anthologized in numerous countries, and has appeared in over forty literary magazines, including Absinthe, Atlanta Review, Bitter Oleander, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, Osiris, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Words Without Borders.
Alexis Levitin translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His forty-four books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Destruction in the Afternoon by Ecuador’s Santiago Vizcaino (Dialógos Books, 2015), Exemplary Tales by Portugal’s leading woman writer, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Tagus Press, September, 2015); and Tiger Fur by Brazil’s Salgado Maranhão (White Pine Press, September, 2015). His translation of Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord was published by Milkweed Editions in 2016. His most recent translation is Outrage by Ecuadorian writer Carmen Váscones (White Dwarf Editions, 2018).
Alexis Levitin translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His forty-four books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Destruction in the Afternoon by Ecuador’s Santiago Vizcaino (Dialógos Books, 2015), Exemplary Tales by Portugal’s leading woman writer, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Tagus Press, September, 2015); and Tiger Fur by Brazil’s Salgado Maranhão (White Pine Press, September, 2015). His translation of Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord was published by Milkweed Editions in 2016. His most recent translation is Outrage by Ecuadorian writer Carmen Váscones (White Dwarf Editions, 2018).
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
They came back to me, those days. Lost at the bottom of a bag, chance transplanting a heart. Who could have guessed your body was the lever lifting mine. The physics of vice is hidden in the guts (she swears). Taking off your clothes is not enough to open the pores of your skin. So, change your heart. It’s not for you I’m saying this. There are other people crowding the sidewalks waiting for death. The eyes are the first to die, the last to reach heaven. And there where even inertia is filled with purity, you can float in eternity. You will not find me (she says) two feet below the ground. I was given feet and hands to write what I’ve undone. But the questions remain safe from us. Don’t fear your lips. They are only the door, the crevice through which death betrays you. But I want you alive at least another night, a night of a truce signed in flames. And don’t underestimate your lips just because I didn’t drain them to the end? How would I enter your mouth tomorrow? You are my best wine and I never waste a ritual. Your face spread wide with pain in the furrows of your childhood. File smooth your nails, my love, through the deep womb that opened your eyes. File your successive deaths till you find a single one that serves you. We know what we are talking about. That no one may suspect the sweetness of this love: the only indispensable violence. That’s how it is: I rock your terrors with my hands on your throat. And if I squeeze, I squeeze your moans on the white patch of sheet. So much struggle for this glory (they feel) curling up in the remains of their joy. You ask me if I’m thirsty. Your lips expecting no reply. Life scratches at our heels. Take off your shoes, wounds only open up for fear.
LEZAMA LIMA’S PEN
When did you realize it was a yelping, that sound of paws clawing at your heart? You grew up within that long wait that slowly drew your father’s face at the head of the table. Death ruled the house with its empty hand and your mother pressed into your fingers the urgency of the words with which you brought back those hours in which joy has no age and splendor passes over everyone as naturally as a clean shirt. They went on walking with the same steps but the father didn’t touch the ground that walked on him and the pleading of the mother whipped your fingers with the words with which you were bringing back his blood his skin the nails of his hand the stories hidden in the gathered hair your father loosened in her memory. But all you did could not go back and the fear that every one weighs remained caught in the wrinkles that clawed your heart like the pulse in the grain of the paper, in the curve of a blotted letter. And the mother spilled a smile before growing still for good between two pages and the blood oozing from your pen.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE OF PLASTIC
There are flowers on the table. I drink water from my representation of a spring. I feel refreshed. You are not in yourself and neither of us is in me. You are on the far side of the sea. You cross me (she sighs and from her breast glistening mouths are born). I drink my representation of water. My thirst is quenched. A flush of flowers dawns (she gallops the break of day). In front of me the representation of a glass of water. I wet my lips. I kiss you. We feel thirst, heat, wellspring, water. I am thirsty. I seek a convincing representation of fresh water (a mirage in wet hair of the rain?) The flowers that I see resemble flowers in themselves. Not in me. Not in plastic (later, she thinks of the eclipse of matter). We see the same flowers. We smell them. We give the same kiss, we drink and we are sated. Like a final rehearsal for a theory of water.
