Of fluff of Pi and of lowsthe word reveals more than pillows:the eye and oh open round pee and ellin wrinkles sunken by heads by hands by fingersin a disorder of hair and secrets.Comforting deafness of earsscarf for eyes and noseintense breathing against clothlivid printer of profilesrecording subtle volumes of the faceo taste of the deep anchor of the dreamfinest web where the world slumbers where sleep trembles!Pillow! When I call to youI hold you and place you vast universebetween the arms and the chinclose to the belly and hipsand I lower you from head to feetin a comforting shudder running through the whole body.O companion lover shadow of peopleo perfection of heatimmaculate convivial friendwith whom struggles are gentlewith whom conversations are beautifulmeek holy and so manyin a rippling of waves.Pillow! Pillow!To spell you is to possess the seanights days in smooth and wrinkled whitenesswith silk-cotton wool and feathersechoing within. AlmofadaDe fofo de Al e de fadasa palavra fala mais do que almofadas:abrem-se os às redondos de éle e de éfenas pregas afundadas por cabeças por mãos por dedosna desordem de cabelos e segredos.Conchego surdo dos ouvidoslenço dos olhos e do narizrespiração intensa rente ao panoimpressor lívido de perfisgravador dos volumes subtis do rostoó gosto do profundo anzol do sonhoteia finíssima onde adormece o mundo onde estremece o sono!Almofada! Quando te digoabraço-te e meto-te universo fundoentre os braços e o queixorente ao ventre e aos quadríse desço-te da cabeça até aos pésnum arrepelar de conchego pelo corpo todo.Ó companheira amante sombra de genteó perfeição do quenteconvívio amigo sem manchaem que as lutas são brandasem que as conversas são lindasmansas santas e tantasnum rebolar de ondas.Almofada! Almofada!Soletrar-te é possuir o marnoites dias na alvura dos lisos e das rugascom a sumaúma a lã e as penaspor dentro a ressoar.
Pillow
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“Pillow” from LEX ICON by Salette Tavares.
Published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
English Translation Copyright © 2025 by Isabel Sobral Campos & Kristofer Petersen-Overton.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Salette Tavares was a highly accomplished and interventionist artist who spanned a great many genres. A distinguished poet, critic, essayist, translator and performer, she was a pioneer of performance, concrete poetry, spatial poetry and conceptual art, but she also worked as an educator and cultural agitator and headed up various associations. As the artist behind an extensive body of radical and provocative work, she declared that “to make something is the most religious service that a human being can perform”.
Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton is a political theorist based in Cambridge, MA.
Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation, selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award, as well as two other full-length poetry books. She has published several chapbooks, with poetry appearing in the Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poems have also been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil). In 2024, her collaborative translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She co-founded and edits Sputnik & Fizzle press.
For the first time appearing in English translation, the poems in LEX ICON present everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. The habitual uses of objects that these poems study point to the inherent philosophical content of the human capacity to produce, or poiesis. Much as abstraction in its representation of things as pictorial patterns at times distils the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, Tavares’ poems accomplish this distillation through language. In this way, LEX ICON connects this writer’s earlier poetry with her graphic sculptural poems. It foregrounds insights about human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in household objects linked to the most bare necessities; and yet, it also presents them as almost mystical artifacts that partake of some unnamed ritual.
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