What if I dreamed this city – e outro poema inédito de Ana Santos

What if I dreamed up this City
told you of skylines
murmuring about my mind.
There’s this hum of lights
thunderous mass of it.
Nooked in spot-beams
steady pinks and yellows
neon blues that hurl through hexagons of light
swath every singular
fraying port. While myriad eyes glare here—restless
blazing in the night.
Did they catch the smell of it?
Ones who ordered bricks to brand the range
of roof-slat
sky?
But we found its neck
the way it was rooted
beautiful thing.
Couldn’t we swim in this lake,
Michigan, dip our skin into the grooved belly of the waves
feeling loved?
I picture us in corduroy,
browns. Drinking tahini
we paint our skin silt
from too much smoothing— your hands
my hands, your
hands.
We cut portions of apples,
wincing, the tart sprays coating our brows.
The table is dirty.
Our knees—
they rest.
———
Not Yet #F433FF[html]; This Borough Here is Breathing
Still, the pink in this city discovers itself. Struts about, an untamed
soupcon, spreading flower cords below street tar. Cerise flits within the hedge
seeds, gurgling through side streets, thrumming under up/down shoe static.
Sparking starched suits to forward swift, pink draws their eyes past high-rise
windows, a roseate jolting cab drivers to pericardial ur-gen-cy— wave-
shocks dormant lungs to their in again, out again. Lighting within a sunbath
it trips ELLE red high heels on sidewalks—a bubblegum of grounding grabandbe-
here. In other words, it holds the ceiling up. Or not the ceiling, but
the top of cloud-dome. Brings some clamant to peer
through crooked skyline, pushes hands between the puffs of
gauze foam. The landform peaks then grab their staring. Hours blowing
coral over coral clouds to mate with blue, creating: violet sunset.
Fading within the spectrum, the bodies bask in rest and ease of breathing.
Meanwhile, under some boulevards, the hue is sprayed in DayGlo pink,
amalgamating wrist-flicks with gravity, a whiff to call the sated head to snap up
like a lamp switch, decorate the underpass in sprays of: dirt, touch,
remember. At the end, it’s every wise man for himself but maybe this is
what we call survival: a city’s pink, like a trap door, that tells us
where to enter.
The boulevards, coated in map keys; shoe static tangl-
ed with light.
———————————————————————————————–
Ana Santos (Estados Unidos, 1988) é poeta, escritora e educadora cujo trabalho existe na interseção entre literatura, psicologia e arte. Mora em Cambridge, Massachusetts, Estados Unidos.