San Pham, Crane Daughter 4
PASSÉ COMPOSÉ
translated from the original Portuguese
you came upstairs
to ask about the words
knocked down by my accent
I asserted that my love is
enormous, a hanging mobile
lost among the sconces;
I said my love is
firm, it returns with apples
and cinnamon on its legs;
if you asked about
fertility, mosquitoes,
the lack of luck,
I would answer that my love is
strong, shakes the trees
whenever it leaves.
Ananda Lima (translator): Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and the chapbooks Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019), and Tropicália (Newfound, 2021). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
Ana Guadalupe (original author): Ana Guadalupe is a Brazilian poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collections Preocupações (Macondo, 2019), Não conheço ninguém que não seja artista (Confeitaria, 2015), and Relógio de pulso (7Letras, 2011). Her first book in English will be published by Scrambler Books. She has translated works by Sylvia Plath, Carmen Maria Machado, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Roxane Gay. Translations of her poems have appeared or are upcoming in Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and Esferas.