Richard Blanco - Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008

Groundbreaking Ceremony, City of South Miami, Sunset Drive Improvements

And so it began: the earth torn, split open

by a dirt road cutting through palmettos

and wild tamarind trees defending the land

against the sun. Beside the road, a shack

leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch,

crates of avocados and limes, white chickens

pecking at the floor boards, and a man

under the shadow of his straw hat, staring

into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know

within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind

him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass,

the soil will be turned, made to give back

what the farmers wish, their lonely houses

will stand acres apart from one another,

jailed behind the boughs of their orchards.

He'll never buy sugar at the general store,

mail love letters at the post office, or take

a train at the depot of the town that will rise

out of hundred-million years of coral rock

on promises of paradise. He'll never ride

a Model-T puttering down the dirt road

that will be paved over, stretch farther and

farther west into the horizon, reaching for

the setting sun after which it will be named.

He can't even begin to imagine the shadows

of buildings rising taller than the palm trees,

the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars

dotting the sky above the road, the thousands

who will take the road everyday, who'll also

call this place home less than a hundred years

after the photograph of him hanging today

in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet

me, the engineer hired to transform the road

again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs,

build another promise of another paradise

meant to last another forever. He'll never see

me, the poet standing before him, trying

to read his mind across time, wondering if

he was thinking what I'm today, both of us

looking down the road that will stretch on

for years after I too disappear into a photo.

in Place of Mind, published by Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011.

Take This Waltz - Sarah Polley

Penélope escreve - José Miguel Silva

É mais que certo: não sinto a tua falta.

Fiquei a tarde toda a arrumar os teus papéis,

a reler as cinco cartas que me foste endereçando

na semana que perdemos: tu no Alentejo,

eu debaixo de água. Fui depois regar as rosas

que deixaste no quintal. Sempre só e sem

carpir o meu estado (porque não me fazes falta),

pus o disco da Chavela que me deste no Natal

e comecei a preparar o teu prato preferido.

Cozinhar fez-me perder o apetite; por isso

abri uma garrafa de maduro e não me custa

confessar-te que não sinto a tua falta.

Por volta das dez horas, obriguei-me a recusar

dois convites pra sair (aleguei androfobia)

e estou neste momento a recortar a tua imagem

(não me fazes falta) nas fotos que possuo de nós dois,

de maneira a castigar com o cesto dos papéis

a inábil idiota que deixou que tu te fosses.

Ulisses já não mora aqui, &etc, 2002

Efterklang - Modern Drift

Luís Filipe Parrado

Com Unhas e Dentes

Estar vivo
é abrir uma gaveta
na cozinha,
tirar uma faca de cabo preto,
descascar uma laranja.
Viver é outra coisa:
deixas a gaveta fechada
e arrancas tudo
com unhas e dentes,
o sabor amargo da casca,
de tão doce,
não o esqueces.

Entre a Carne e o Osso, Língua Morta, 2012

Drugs v. Drink - Mick Imlah (from The Lost Leader)

Amores de Verão - José Duarte

Amores de Verão

Aguardava sempre os meses de Verão para conhecer as miúdas novas que vinham da grande cidade passar uns dias à terra dos avós. Depois de as conhecer esperava o momento certo para começar a sofrer antecipando a sua partida.

De Dias Úteis, a sair um dia destes.

Robot and Frank - Jake Schreier

Just Kids - Patti Smith

The following day was my sister Linda's birthday, but there was to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. When they returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me to tell me Stephanie had died. Her grief was quickly replaced with concern as she felt my forehead. I was burning with fever. 

Our apartment was quarantined. I had scarlet fever. In the fifties it was much feared since it often developed into a fatal form of rheumatic fever. The door to our apartment was painted yellow. Confined to bed, I could not attend Stephanie 's funeral. Her mother brought me her stacks of comic books and her cigar box of charms. Now I had everything, all her treasures, but I was far too ill to even look at them. It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. I also would never receive Stephanie 's forgiveness. But as I lay there night after night, it occurred to me that it might be possible to speak with her by praying to her, or at least ask God to intercede on my behalf. 

Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, languorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. "Tell me the Stephanie story," he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic, as we tried to pretend we weren't hungry. And always, when I got to the part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, "Patti, no . . ." 

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark. 

I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat. 

I would later make large detailed drawings of these humorously humiliating moments for Robert. He delighted in them, seeming to appreciate all the qualities that repelled or alienated me from others. Through this visual dialogue my youthful memories became his.

Just Kids, Patti Smith, Bloomsbury, 2010

The National - Demons

A poem by Harryette Mullen - Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia

as horses as for

as purple as we go

as heartbeat as if

as silverware as it were

as onion as I can   

as cherries as feared

as combustion as want

as dog collar as expected

as oboes as anyone

as umbrella as catch can

as penmanship as it gets

as narcosis as could be

as hit parade as all that

as icebox as far as I know

as fax machine as one can imagine

as cyclones as hoped

as dictionary as you like

as shadow as promised

as drinking fountain as well

as grassfire as myself

as mirror as is

as never as this

Sleeping with the Dictionary, University of California Press, 2002

Terrible Love - The National

Kele - Tenderoni

Simão Valente - Miniatura

I

Passei pela casa de só paredes,

pensei que podia ser ouvido o

murmúrio mas sem se saber de

onde vinha. Junto ao caminho

as flores brancas que eu usava

como exemplo por ninguém

recordar que são brancas: o

lilás das pontas reluz. Depois

o portão, partido, pilares duplos

de que antes se entrava por onde

agora se passa. Sem entrave não

pode haver ingresso, ainda que

aquela casa já não esteja lá.

Simão Valente, Miniatura, Artefacto, 2013.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

James Blake - Retrograde

Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado, Fireball, Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait, 1991

Drink Deep - Laura Veirs

Cave dive - Joe Dunthorne

Every sixteen metres of depth is equivalent to one alcoholic drink.

– Mauro Bertolini, The Diver’s Handbook


He remembers being six,
lying on his back beneath a kitchen chair,
gazing up at his father’s unmapped nostrils,
his mother’s skirt riffling past like a spotted
eagle ray. Underneath the dining table,
he found pencil marks: a quarter-circle
and two words underscored. Possible Extension.
Back then, it was a code or perhaps
the solution to a code.
          On the cave bed,
it takes a blue whale’s long blink to fathom
what one plus one turns in to. The sky peers
down from blue-green slots like the lamp fittings
of his youth. His slow mind thinks time
is just another surface, he can pass through
the swirling halocline that keeps us
from our pasts:
          the fresh and the preserved.
Back in his father’s study, pouring a bag
of marbles across the rug. In the glow
from the tentacled lampshade, he holds
up his Bosser, sees himself swimming
in its spiral reef.
          Letting drift his aqualung,
he is either young or drunk. From his lips
he scatters balls of glass.

Retirado daqui.