Lucianna Chixaro Ramos


When everything is spoiled

The girls from Daisies were fighting on TV,
Cake, wine, china, flying in destructive arcs.
I lay on the balcony—

I brought my soft-cased pillow to the earth-
splattered concrete, drank your bottle
of Campo Viejo until the mischief smiled

in me like Jarmilla tricking, the trickster
that sent off yet another old man to the train

alone: on my television screen. In another scene,
Marie I and II place the broken plates back
onto the table, whispering. I wonder

if: stifled harshness could put back together
what has already been destroyed;
if: as I trace my feet on the soft rug

with its budding flowers, small birds—if:
I can be like a bird or flower, lightly perched,
listening & still, no mischief to be found.



Life-Cycle (XX)

pocket-size apostasy ironbody ripe XX master fragment next

leaflets increasing in size by stigmatic union, cavities with or without wings thirteen aromatic with watery juice equidistant fruit pale and astringent of the previous year, their resinous surrounded by persistent filaments fissured, pithy firm at maturity but puberulous terminal with subequal withering + or – partitions ventral cavities wing-margined, many-flowered

long-stalked, formed filled with dry powder females bearing their inner face needle shaped clusters in a membranous sheath in falling leave elevated scars nut-hard appearing early from buds anthers introrse, styles short, lobed, silky durable & solitary united into a column revolute & penniveined on the upper surface, their scales bearing all the others ovary with obliquely arched in germination extending to lobes only flesh unfolding to

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If Only You Understood...

Lucianna Chixaro Ramos is a Brazilian born and Florida raised poet who co-founded Obra/Artifact, the journal of the MFA of the Americas at Stetson University. She enjoys living in a multilingual universe and answering her toddler’s questions about how the world works. You can find her work in the journal New South.

The source text for "Life-Cycle (XX)" is The Manual of the Trees of North America.

"If Only You Understood..." is a series of technologically mediated translations whose aim is to give a voice back to the people its original texts attempted to oppress.
 
 
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