Pillow

Salette Tavares
Translated from the Portuguese by Isabel Sobral Campos & Kristofer Petersen-Overton

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.

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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 & Isabel Sobral Campos

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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