Translated by Pina Piccolo, from the collection Di un’altra voce sarà la paura, Leonida edizioni, 2024. Cover art by Laure Keyrouz.
Nightmare
A bouquet of yellow flowers
illuminates the burst smile
of her half closed eyes
discovering the sadness of the world
in so many kidnapped moons.
Red lips filled with mistreated
words thought in the silence
of the soul: intent on understanding
deafness the spirit misplaces the semantics
of flight, losing its feathers in syntax.
A tumultuous heart, devoid of custom,
doesn’t seem made of flesh, but of stone,
with its light turned off by anguish
rises from the depths of an unmade bed,
silently and breathless.
Night falls abruptly
on the living nightmare, enveloping in horror
the hatred of humans,
who resignedly encourage sick
dreams while raping a star
that has stopped shining.
A dangerous game
You could play
with my butterflies,
tear off their wings
while roaming
in my dream
like the slumbering lily
of my malaise.
You could even have been
a lyrical vessel
a ghost leaning forward
like a shadow, behind my rivers
of tears.
You could have been
a memory, yet you beat
like a bloodless heart.
You are the hour that always returns
in the image
of a flight that never was,
returning to tear off again
and again
my wings
All that arrives to me is always cursed
my hand only knows how to draw marks of death
Another world for me
Under the skin beats a heart
that doesn’t know its beat; it could be
anyone’s heart, but it’s mine
and feels important and worthless;
I have an open wound
on my scarred chest
like a deserted court
of earth scorched
by acid tears, trampled,
turned to stone, just to exist.
Nothing can be read in my gaze.
Removed from the world with my claws
tensed up, I detach myself from me to avoid my sight,
I still embrace my old reality,
I get lost in my new features,
those of dreams that were mutilated by you
who claimed to love me.
There is no other world
for me. My eyes are closed,
perhaps I can suppress my tears,
the last ones…
Before returning to life
In the fatal distraction
of not recognizing myself.
You are another
Something in you is expecting
silence of me, something
that is not my self
denouncing your dark
form that demands me to lay
supine, the object of a slow
violence.
Something in you changes
when alcohol takes hold of you
vomiting a nightmare
that is darker than night.
Unknown nastiness
comes out of you, a dance
of tarantulas is activated by alcohol; poison
distorts your starry pupil.
Your sweet disposition is
erased, you are transformed.
You’re another, I don’t know
if out of insecurity, but you leave me
nothing but room to surrender
to all terrors.
Metamorphosis
You are small on that centuries old
giant covering you among pine
needles, an extraordinary drop
of life organizing within itself the idea
of living like a goddess as
from a cocoon you
blossom into wings.
I knew you
as a worm creeping up and down
with your soft fleshy rings
covered with a little, furry
coat that kept you
warm while you dreamed
of flying, free.
In the stillness
of fate, your thoughts
moved toward escape, your body stretching
In the transformation, so you could identify
in the new shape of a flower
that flies, turning butterfly.
Elsewhere
Quick tears
take me to far away
places, where everything that sees me
recognizes me as something called a woman
without a homeland, without a nest
crushed by chills
like a liquid losing
the shape pores have dictated
so that it can then flow
far
away.
Yuleisy Cruz Lezcano was born in Cuba and lives in Italy, near Bologna. She has a degree in Biology and an MA in Nursing and Obstetrical Sciences and currently works in the health field. She translates Italian poets into Spanish and, conversely, makes available the work of poets from Spain, South and Central America to Italian readers through her Italian translations. She has published 18 books and won numerous literary prizes. Her italian poems have been translated into french, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Albanian.
