This woman is not a woman.
she is a sort of bendable agony,
a maleable victim of the words.

she smiles more than she can bear
and pleases the walking clouds.
she is gentle with the rattle snakes
no matter how close they are.
she believes invisibility and camouflage
are synonyms.

she hasn't changed much
since she became a symptom.
ubiquity is her strength.
she is where silence is law.

it's a pity you can't hear
her heart beating beneath her ragged dreams.
i bet you thought she was dead.
she isn't yet.
i was told you misconfused her
for a piece of furniture.
it is not your fault though.
you can blame those who came
before her if you feel more comfortable.

she may survive eternity
because she has endured the burden
of being a whisper,
a distant wound.

as she marches against everything,
i wonder who can empower her.,
who can understand when
she says she wants to be free,
not brave.

karla bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2020

if you climb silently into my skin
on a cold windy night,
my oceans will not refuse
the silence you carry
when the words are beyond us
and around us, dragging syllables,
sounds, serpents.

it is close to our blood,
to our uniqueness and despair.
we held impossible meanings
in between our teeth
as if we could bleed poetry
every time the ink pen fell
on our white t.shirts.

but we both know poetry
can't save us from the fortune cookies
we were given before
we could even choose
our own pain.

both you and i were made
to be hesitant and incomplete.
sometimes we forgive the rhymes.
sometimes we are the rhymes,
the rhythm, the rare overdelicate clouds
enveloping the innocents.
sometimes.

can't say we are necessary though
because we waste our time
becoming miracles, becoming sentences
crying for the same old baptism suspended
between what we dreamt and are.

we aren't ashamed of that yet.
we still have many years ahead
to be resilient and dwell in our
own murmur and paranoia
because here is where we still
sprout up in darkness
as the moon sews
our satin mouths,
our floating selves.

karla bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2020

it is just an empty page calling me
and poetry is born from this mistake.

i feel i need to desorganize my insides
to give birth to a new part of me but
there's no hope because
life has no sense when there's nothing
written, when there are no lines
to be completed.
it is the predicable logic of poetry.

some may think there's no beauty
in a blank page but i see a world
hidden beneath it.
a heart pulses, a petal falls,
an egg breaks and poetry is there:
so fragile and intense.

it comforts me to see it waiting
to be wrapped up in sugar and salt.
it is the predicable logic of poetry:
to be lost and found,
to die in us as we live in doubt
but pure.

oh enchantment! let me sink
in your multiple voices,
in your illusion and faith
because this page is part of my uthopy
and it needs me to be perplexing
and infinite.

karla bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2020

We both know what 
the black stars hide:
our brainless fears,
our lost encephalic mass,
our forgetful silhouettes.

yesterday i spent some time
staring at an indiferent mirror
in a restaurant as if that
amnesiac face could tell me
what to do.
but there is no goodness
in keeping memories
when one can't remember them.
time is deceitful.

i look at her,
holding the heart of my heart,
forgetting who she was
to see who she is now.
tomorrow is an oblivious man
dressed in white.
tomorrow we will shoot doubts 
at him like two soldiers in an execution.
i wonder if he can decipher
the enigmas written in her mind.

if i could for one single moment,
stop the process of being swallowed
by time,
i would be a baby in her ever open arms again:
she made me think i was a butterfly.
she made me think i could be
whoever i wanted to be as long as
i believed.
but i am afraid of praying:
the raw wounds in my knees,
the words i repeat in exile,
the holes in my weird faith.
i know it loves me like
a distracted god.

there is no comfort
in being a bleeding moon
when we become a lovely concept,
an ideal forgotten in the drawers
of a memory.
i am not prepared to accept
and as i weep for both of us,
the clock haunts me more.

against me time, the deaf king runs.

the future is a three-dimensional black image,
an x-ray of our bitten nails
as we wait for Astor Piazzola
to play oblivion again.

i even don't know how to end
this poem.
it is late and all i can do
is to murmur to myself
to be strong,
to be honest,
to not cry
because life is a miracle,
because she still remembers
our love, our ties, our misery.

kala bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2016

I summon you

to touch her suffering,

lifting the veil of the blue moon

because she whirls within a circle,

protected by the stars,

resting in a faith

a few dare to understand.

she is the radiant is

and loves you as you become

what you are, and

you are the earth i am standing on,

the falling water reflecting

my face:

everything that honours life.

shhhh...

(women are holy here:

they speak in tongues

and their rhythms belong

to the drums as the winds rise.

if for two seconds

your intellect could ascend to her,

the whole mankind would be

forgiven and beauty could be

revealed.)

but

your eyes brought you

face to face to heaven

and there one sided truth

prevails.

we are not different though.

my original impulse 

still summons you

to vibrate

because faith pulses

everywhere,

because suffering escapes me.

karla bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2016

Demeter blessed my coffee
with another doubt

her poetry squeaks:

it is hate,

After her,
i grant myself the permission
to wait for nothing.
that doesn't mean
she was the best option
for our collective unconscious.
we inherit retro dreams,
stupidities and
the incomprehensible macho stance:
the burden of the burden.

The leaf waits for me
like a woman in love:
naked, eager, languid.

If you could get out of your own light

for three minutes

and accept the burning words,

the implausible darkness

we all hide and hold,

you would forgive

my postmodern sexuality

and sunlit mind.

She's walking into smoke
again and her mind swirls,
avoiding linearity,
stretching over
the repulsive night.

i am afraid when her eyes
is a force against me
and release the past in
small clouds of self-pity.

I hope you talk in poems,
touching my insides with
words painted in flames.
my sun in the glass,
the crystal of the hours undoning
my grief;
roses picked in small vowels,
the spirit of the letters lightening
my perpendicular urge for more.
i hope

to love with my palms open
as Vaults sing, as our reflexes

This poem will coagulate
like blood, staining our black land
with unheard prophecies 
as i try to write you
what was taken away.

look at us:
the wind broke over our skin
and we stretched our muscles
to feel our perfect nothing;
we lost our blunt knives
and we can't fight anymore.
consider this.

Ladies and gentlemen,
here she comes.
a big round of applause, please.
she cooks, sweeps, does the ironing
and the washing-up.
(nah!she's not chained home!
she works out most of times too.)
she sews, mends and serves everybody
as if she was paid for that.
(but she isn't...oh!!!)

Draw me again
to nameless things
because they are the soft ones.
simple as a stone
simple as yesterday.

She was lying in bed, half sick,
feeling, just feeling the song
eating her morning in a crescendo
she couldn't bear.
her pain spiraling downwards,
conjured her black heart,
to explode in accords
never heard before, 
slowly,
slowly.

Against the cold, we crawl
like toddlers.
it is below zero
and we freeze slowly
in our galaxies
as we grow more brazilian
month after month
so scared, so tired of scratching
our elbows on invisible desks
and thorns.

our painful pleasure
always climbs my mossy walls
and it is sweet
to make me suffer
with so much care.

I'd like to tell you
i'm surviving but not breathing
not now, not yet.
you know
it's been pretty difficult
to be confused all the time.
consider this.
my demons, my angels,
my perfect halo, my desire
to succumb to myself again,
soulless, weird, naked, disform.
i'm filled with strange things
and i don't know who
or what put this in me.

There she goes

ripped apart

bleeding poetry

as somebody thrusts another love-knife

deeper and deeper.

she.

who is she?

(nobody,

nobody)