Invisible Creatures
Orange laranjas, seis reais. The afternoon in Copacabana has sunscreen bottles and pharmacies. Near a tree, passengers wait at the bus stop. Secretly, I am naked in Portuguese. After a day at the beach, I drink coffee, and eat cheese buns. There is violence in Brazil, yes, but there is also so much more. Where I live, the snow falls occasionally, and the rain freezes my fingers. In spite of the dead trees, I desire the arrival of the summer, while I have fantasies of walking barefoot on soft sand, intimate with the invisible creatures of the heat. In that same life, I watch soap operas online and miss my family, when shopping in the organic supermarket. The privilege is to wish for tropical fruits while they still last. Hold onto the flavor as though they were pearls, unique and precious.
Latitude
The sun explodes in the canvas
of an unfinished painting,
a muscular entropy of the heart.
The brush is left alone in the dark,
as she lies naked in bed, empty
of imagination.
The latitude of an image
circumscribes the roughness of being.
Hunger for Tropical Things
She wakes up, acorda, with an intense necessity to devour tropical things. “In winter, the search for the sun is insana,” he says, finding it important to explain everything with statistics. “It is the foreigner’s syndrome,” he concludes, the paper in his hands. I don’t understand what you are saying. “If someone likes fruits, it is normal to miss pineapples,” she replies, “simple like that.” I feel much closer to myself when I have this conviction.
by Desirée Jung
Desirée Jung is a Canadian-Brazilian writer. Her work aims to stress the boundaries within languages. Desirée has published translations, fiction and poetry in Exile, The Dirty Goat, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Antagonish Review, The Haro, The Literary Yard, Black Bottom Review, Gravel Magazine, Tree House, Bricolage, Hamilton Stone Review, Ijagun Poetry Journal, Scapegoat Review, Storyacious, Perceptions, Loading Zone, and others. Desirée has participated in several artist residencies, including the Banff Centre, in Canada, and Valparaiso, in Spain. She worked with Canadian poet George McWhirter in her M.F.A in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Moreover, her research and Ph.D. thesis in Comparative Literature was based in the works of Canadian poet P. K. Page. More information can be found on her website, desireejung.com
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