No poem is made of truth. Mine, for example, are made of more complex materials: a lacerated chest, requited love, dehumanization, anger, melancholy, her eyes, late afternoons, doubts, etc. Everything and a little more, at an indescribable speed that weakens me, sometimes the body, sometimes the mind, sometimes the soul, which needs stitching with fine thread, soaked in my instantaneous truths.
When love does not love you out loud, ask it to leave. When love finds it easier to praise other women for the smallest things they do and stereotype you over the little things, walk away. Love is not a state of disarray. Sew your chest back together and write what love does not want to hear, but pretends to.
My permanent space is not the kitchen. I know how to nurture friendships, but that is not servitude. And if it is, I say, there is no room in my chest for the plantations, nor for the sinhá, nor for the sinhô. My body becomes a carnival, and without irony I say: Do not treat me badly if you cannot treat me as an equal.
Translator’s note: The Portuguese terms sinhá and sinhô are historically charged forms of address for enslavers or masters and mistresses in Brazil. The word engenhos refers to the sugar plantations and mills associated with slavery. These terms evoke the legacy of slavery and the racialized structures of servitude.
No one taught me how to love; love, to me, is an unfamiliar metaphor, one that does not acknowledge me publicly or hold my hand. Love does not take pleasure in me, does not declare anything to me day in and day out. “Love” gives me bouquets of flowers from Chernobyl, has a thousand profiles that seem like a mirage of what I need and what my body asks of me. If love were a hundred-year-old woman, I would ask her to marry me, shocking the entire social order with a belated love upon the soft skin of time that never caressed me.
I need to write with affection, but with the same hands I write with, I pull the pin, trigger the malfunction, blow apart images, discourses, and ideas created about me at the expense of my silence. I need to say that I know how to touch what is tender, that I know how to kiss deliciously, that I experience pleasure and feel everything around me. I am not flesh, I am not a part, I am triple: blood and synapses. Sometimes I am dizziness itself, I live in the silence of an indescribable murmuring sea. Sometimes I am the irreversible mold of the Nation’s history: I devour the national archive and defecate pesticides and exploitation. I need to write with my own hands, my own eyes, and my own tears. Put away the white erasers, the correction fluid, and the “delete” key. I write in this language because other languages were stolen from me and this one was imposed upon me.