bothered
Girl, I was a gecko.
I was the one who, though useful —
they all agree on that
he deserved neither compassion nor praise.
What was good only served me
as an epitaph: “She ate everything
It didn't work for us." Not really
I was saved from early death.
I'm more repulsive than the ones I've eliminated.
my transparency
bothers, just like when I drag
belly full of dirt.
I got used to the rictus of disgust
in the face of the whole family when my
yellow tail ran across the tiles.
I wanted to emphasize the color, Yellow, because this
is an unfortunate color in my case: “The shit
it's yellow like a lizard's.
For knowledge more than disclosed
no one ignores that this ass here
could be left there.
A tail like that is an uncertain little child
the love of your parents. all the time fear
to be abandoned, feels that they are beings
distinct from each other, she and her parents;
feels that it is a burden to be carried.
My eyes are big and a little green,
well lateralized, like those of a fetus — I breathe in
afraid because I must look like an early form.
Everything precocious would have jumped out
in some order. In that order, you have
a natural finish.
Only then are you released for a walk
because then no one who sees him will be afraid.
Door handle
How many times are happy
when I'm turned,
others terrified; I sense the way
how I will be touched by the steps:
heavy, fast or skittish.
Thin steps indicate that I will be
carefully rotated,
as if they bribed me
or cover my mouth.
handled with a bang
I transmit rudeness, confidence, assault
or a shameless desire.
Sometimes I play a trick on the very anxious
and I fall into your hand.
This is something that makes some laugh,
but there are those who are disturbed:
angled at a sinister 90 degrees, the handle
that releases is like a blow to him
of life, of fate,
like a snake
the abandoned shell.
No, it is not -
it's just the sardonic laugh that fell
from my mouth.
Associations
Illustration from a children's Bible depicts Jonah
................................................[holding a lantern inside the
................................................[belly of the first famous whale
................................................[that I heard about.
It was an anachronism
in a time of precarious lighting,
and also a danger
to the organism that hosted it;
but the light was warm
and the yellow spread
through the rosy red of the gallery,
very high ceilings,
the stuffing of cetacean meat.
Three days and three nights —
so it was determined.
Better than being on a boat
it was like being inside a whale.
Meek and endowed with other skills,
this old mate knows how to deal
with the fits of maritime temperament.
It should be noted that he has the most solid build —
hard to imagine a leak or crevice
in that thickness;
captured there, Jonah enjoyed delicious
calming warmth, the closest there can be
that of a placenta. Thick was still the silence
to make an ascetic jealous.
I thought to myself that it must be good
sleep there, I thought and then crossed myself —
where have you ever seen yourself wanting to be locked up
inside hell,
in the belly of the enemy?
(No, Jonah, this is not your mother's womb.)
Who would like to stay, like Joseph,
inside a well?
Jonas should leave,
that it was soon, that he didn't forget
of your purpose in the world, as —
and then another mythology came to my aid —
the hero who lost the ring
received as a sign of obstinate love.
During part of the tale, we
practically just hoped that the handsome young man
find the thread of yourself and return home
with the fresh anxiety of someone starting to live.
How afraid I was then that one day I would forget
for a long time from someone I felt for
the most painful tenderness,
to find him under the snow that I didn't know
and imagined much colder,
to find him lying in the street due to a heart attack
like my grandfather I saw myself,
in the earliest childhood,
under a cold disenchanted rain;
of finding him old and himself of all
forgotten,
even if you can't find it,
arriving miserably late.
Borba Gato
What did I know about you? What did I hear?
“You will pass close to Borba Gato and then
turn right", "Yeah, yeah, I live close
of that rubbish.”
The most critical or the ones with good taste
or those that were one and the other
always expressed that about you,
I had no doubts, and neither did the pictures
had the strength to persuade me otherwise.
But up close, up close
I've never seen you fatter, taller,
less or uglier than what they told me.
I glimpsed your figure from far, far away.
Maybe I would have avoided it more than once
skirting a nondescript monument on the avenue
inhospitable and absurd — is what makes me so melancholy
the mirrored glass totems…
It was for these that I strayed —
you didn't smell or stink for me
in terms of landscape, so to speak.
(I demand so little in this matter and in this city,
and still no one cares.)
In general the cameras caught you in counter-plot,
and no matter how much
If I didn't know your exact height,
with that naturally you grew up —
for the first time you were monumental —,
you grew far beyond that sad and scourged bush
in the flowerbed on the avenue where they planted you.
A thick tail of smoke —
the fire had been stoked from behind
as they sometimes do to cats —
expanded to the sides
until it becomes a halo;
your feet stepped on ashes
but you didn't fall.
You could see that you warmed up like a rocket
about to take off from the pedestal
— but how far would you go?
in thin air? And then you could glide
on a continuous and stable trajectory?
Or the most stony of nature's laws
then subdue you?
What's your breath, rocket?
How I wanted it big,
then peripheral, then intergalactic.
*Priscila Figueiredo is a professor of Brazilian literature at USP. Author, among other books, of Matthew (poems) (well i saw you).