29.11.17

2 poemas de Hieu Minh Nguyen




Changeling

Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly
says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her
back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth
& it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat.
Everyday after school, I would kneel before her.
I would remove my clothes & ask her to mark the progress.
It’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful
for her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better.
I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills
with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her
back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.



Cockfight

I met my brother once
in a small village in Vietnam
who, upon meeting me
grabbed my small arm
& dragged me into the woods
behind his house
where a group of men
all wearing our father's face
stood in a circle, cheering
while the two roosters
whose beaks had barbed hooks
taped to them, pecked
& clawed each other open
until the mess of bloodied feathers
were replaced by two clean birds
one, my brother's. The other
a man's, who, I am told is deaf
but vicious. He told me
our father calls him long distance
from America, every week.
I can't help but wonder how
they tell the roosters apart
since the blood has turned their feathers
the same shade of burgundy.
I told him how our father, who lives
only three mile away from me
avoids making eye-contact at supermarkets.
I can tell this made him happy.
Though, he didn't cheer
when the crowd cheered, when one rooster
fell to the dirt with a gash in its neck
I knew he was the winner
the way he lowered his head to hide
his smile, how he looked at me
then snatched his earnings
from the vicious man's hands.
I learned what it was like to be a brother
by watching the roosters
& how, at first, the air was calm
until they were introduced
& then they knew:
there could only be one.






14.11.17

Rui Pires Cabral

http://mykristeva.tumblr.com/post/167483539240/poesia-colagem-dispersos-saudações-para-o

The Journey to Kafiristan (2001)




In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul, but each is in pursuit of her own project. Their mutual journey through the outside world, which runs from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story. True story.


8.11.17

Rui Nunes


2.



por vezes a tua cara torna-se nítida e insuportável. 
Outras vezes, esbate-se e com o esbatimento vem-me a resignação 
de te ter perdido. Às vezes, esqueço-te. Ou ficas escondido numa casa, 
num quadro, numa árvore, de onde ressurgirás. Um dia olharei o quadro, 
a casa, a árvore, e lembrar-me-ei de ti. Mas cada vez haverá menos 
sítios onde te esconderes.

a tua face vem e atira-me sempre para o mesmo tempo, 
é uma face que o ódio esquece, anterior à deserção, 
a face de quem encontrou a primeira palavra, 
é essa que me olha nos sítios mais vulgares. 
Não te procuro: de repente, estás ali.

Como uma arma. 
O límpido assassino.




Rui Nunes
in Ouve-se sempre a distância numa voz
Relógio D'Água





5.11.17

Lygia Lygia



Belo documentário sobre Lygia Fagundes Telles, dirigido por seu filho Goffredo Telles Neto
e co-dirigido por Paloma Rocha, premiado no Festival de Cinema de Gramado.



Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 19: Andante (3. movement)


Cello: Jiří Bárta Piano: Marián Lapšanský



4.11.17

Anne Carson




Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions



3.11.17

Scherezade Siobhan



MIRA, AFTER FATHER'S RADIATION THERAPY.

​In a hospital, God is a scar tissue. A dog breathes as if a slur slipping off
my drunk uncle’s tongue. I place the poem between a prayer and a profanity. 
Here is the plucked rooster of my mouth, redder than an exit wound.
Here are the crows blacker than my grandmother’s misspelled tattoos. 
I swallow the root of turmeric. Stuff my cheeks with cupful of cardamoms.
Here’s to homemade antidotes, a halt in the hell of motion sickness. Purge
the vomit with goatmilk & camphor oil. Chew the marigold off the garland
coiled around his photograph like a sedated viper. Mourning fills the gaps
in my memory in an inexact dose of steroids. Any absence creates
the illusion of closeness. A callus grows on my big toe and I séance
the cratered fiction of  skin with the pinprick of a hairclip. When
the cancer came, his cells dominoed as if a cheap loss in a game of tetris.
His lung x-rayed in a charcoal map of the Andaman. Summer tiptoed
a month later than usual. The henna green swirl of my skirt had stilled itself
by then. My mother’s anklets divorced their bells, were unhooked, shoved deep
into the throat of a mango wood cupboard. Every evening we sat on the porch-swing in his hand-built pagoda. The obi of darkness rearranging the geometry of our grief. The fingertips of java plum trees elongated with the extempore of parrots. My mother’s eyes as bloodshot as their beaks. These birds never leave home, she said. They’d turn feral and empty out any tree.They’d rust a cage with the clockwork of mimicry. But they stayedNo diaspora clings to their wingspan. No pilgrimage across the arbor vitae of hemispheres. So, we sat back and let the green venery wrap the dusk in an epilogue of plumes. Our hands cupping the storm  whispering inside each teacup. Our bodies turning silver with rain.