Words Making Love

of herself to herself with words replacing the veins, the city gravitates in the sensitive fragments of verbs. a night movement lives on the highest floors of solitude. the great city rushes in the convocation of men that are lost and found in the same space. the hot age of the earth dies in my hands as I pass this sad bridge which will connect you with Setúbal. you could not pay the houses I sell not even if you double your existence. the shingles linger in my eyes remembers the crackling sound of your presence. I love to laugh today. English Version first appeared at Spittoon Collective Spittoon Collective

rough mornings burn away sleep and fever fizzes up the most vertical of words. your finger on my name exerts agonising pressure and a spasm runs through this text while hell is slowly hatching inside my chest like a snake creeping into the unsteady hollows of the hours. sparks fly out of books and the flames urgently heal each less intended breath but there are assignments less sweet than others and there are syllables set to vibrate in the core of the deepest innocence. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

the power of the landscape corrupts the text, it penetrates its frailty. the game of the tactile, of the glowing, of the scenic tension of your name – so tense is it, that it isn’t displayable – but i can always display this photograph, not on walls as in times past, but i can still ingrain it into your subconscious through the feed of your wall on one of those social networks where there’s no place for debate since each person is the dictator of his own reality, which might even be convenient were we able to be solely confronted by that which doesn’t shock us. let me rejoice with the power to see you and the power to know you see me, thus i am an image, i am fleshy matter, i am back and shoulders and eyelids, i exist because light exists. allow me to upload this existence directly into the deepest memory of your libido. it’s probably simpler. words are the business of poets. © Translated by Ana Hudson, 2013 First Published on  Poems From the Portuguese

Sara F. Costa is a Portuguese poet who has won several literary prizes in Portugal. She has published five books and has a degree in Oriental Languages and Cultures and an MA in Intercultural Studies: Portuguese/Chinese from Minho University, Portugal, and Tianjin Foreign Studies University, China. She has a Phd in Portuguese Studies, specializing in Literature. Her thesis explores the translations Camilo Pessanha made of Ming poems. In 2017, she was an invited author of the International Istanbul Poetry Festival 2017. In 2018, she worked with The Script Road-Macau Literary Festival and the China-European Union Literary Festival in Shanghai and Suzhou. Her works have been translated and featured worldwide in Literary Journals and Magazines, from Brazil to China. She lived in Beijing and coordinated writing and reading events with a Beijing-based arts collective called Spittoon. She is currently a Professor at Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal.