After the sculpture of the same title, by Cristóvão Canhavato (1966-) The weapons here disarmed are exhausted, like the sky of Mozambique. Like…

After the painting The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) The milk that here falls forever and flows as if it were true, a…

After the sculpture Slave “Atlas”, by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) The force expanding in the body, trying to escape the brute state, makes him…

After the painting of the same title, by Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) The wings of her eyebrows invent the flight of a seagull on…

After the painting Portrait of Sebastián de Morra, by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) The direct gaze of this dwarf does not lower. (Whoever considers…

After the painting Washerwomen, by Candido Portinari (1903-1962) In the bundles on the heads of these girls there are dirty clothes worn by…

After the painting Portrait of Jan Van Amstel and Anna Boxhoorn, by Abraham van den Tempel (1622-1672) He’s nobody, the painting tells us:…

After the painting Dance, by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) In the music of this silence, the dance of the magic of holding hands that…

Poem based on a photograph by Sebastião Salgado, in which a one-legged-man on crutches walks down a street in Kabul, Afghanistan. The buildings…

Poem inspired by a photograph by Sebastião Salgado, in which a woman with her children watch their own house go up in flames….

For Gema The title of this poem, as well as the idea from which it began, comes from the book Le Pas Si…

On 22 June 1937, the poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, born in Madagascar, committed suicide by swallowing 10 grams of potassium cyanide. We don’t know…

I already know that I’ll never be a perfect polyglot. Neither can I try and make the journey back. The rule of the…

Learning to read a language – whatever language – is to drag to the surface the taste of words anchored to the paper…

To take me in, Paris gave me birth, inside out. But its womb was cold. I penetrated with my body and soul. Her…

Mother, dead word in the mouth that sings the passing of life. And I go on burying her in me, in the least…

My mother died in London, though she had her death in Salvador. In me, she died in London. And I, alone, hidden in…

I napped on the floor, on a mattress. He slept on the bed. He got up many times to go to the bathroom…

For my father My father’s fingers yearned for the chalk dust on the hands of a teacher, the wiped-off words – the ashes…

For my mother In that classroom beyond the school, the ground was Periperi’s beach, the walls floated, no end in sight, the blackboard was…