PRISCA AGOSTONI
DIALOGUES
I.
with Dany Laferrière: survival
being in the epicenter
of the apocalypse
the island a language
in extinction
a floating wound:
I carry a notebook
in the apex of the tragic
day and I write
:: stone
:: tree
:: dust
:: children
I am back to the square one
of being human, when
words were
essays against blindness
after another tremor
covered in debris
I go see the flowers
intact in the crater
the flexible stem
falsely fragile
reminds me of the narrator’s voice
that never surrenders
:: crying
:: thanking
all that dances
+
Here we also have
tremors, earthquakes
devastated cities
destruction towers over
and marches anonymously over rivers
and buried
people
but the flowers here
are different, Dany
here we also have
a surviving Haiti
migrant, resilient
a country
like a living crater
but here the dance is different
Dany, and the flowers’ stems
goes on hard
as rifle pipes
2.
with Edimilson Pereira: resistance
the cup as alibi
the hand angrily
stirs the coffee
– you see me calm
but infer, it is not
how they sear, inside me, the words
the fire spread out
within the body
I did not arrive here alone
I was with others
the absent,
this living current
thickening the blood
so, that’s it:
I do not know another paradise
unless this full half
this empty half
of ours
resisting
+
I know indeed about the fucking bites
to chew your edges
laughter, pauses, plants
your gestures delivered
as antidotes against anger
you do not give up, you fight
– a tiger
never lonely –
with your word arsenal
3.
with Patrick Chamoiseau: migrance
it is a poetry
that is also politics
of relationships
the eye polen
the urgence of beauty
the expansion,
inside us,
of other landscapes
+
migration as a spider
to weave and unweave
the invisible and precarious
web
of a map
ABOARD THE BOAT
III.
Inhabiting a language as one inhabits a house
an old jacket
a dark basement
inhabiting a name as a relic
an anonymous room
a broken toy
inhabiting a journey as one inhabits a town
growing inside
digging the earth like a ferret
inhabiting the animal we are, surviving
within us, never mind the hunger, never mind the night,
waiting for the hand to pet us
inhabiting the transitory, the undefined
what moves us, being a tree
taking roots, being a crimson flower in the sea
inhabiting the death riding the wave
horizon as distant cliff
the boat that is the destination
inhabiting the scream, the vertigo, the hand that holds
another hand, Europe, the closest
harbor, two steps away