Kátia Bandeira de Mello-Gerlach, is a Brazilian fiction writer residing in New York City. Her first two books of short stories were published by Projeto Dulcinéia Catadora, an art collective, part of the Latin American cartonera movement. Disquiet International participant in June, 2016 with grant by the Luso American Foundation, FLAD. 2017 Fellow at the New York Foundation for the Arts Program. Kátia contributes to literary journals in Brazil, Portugal, USA and France including La Cause Littéraire, Curious Fiction, Words without Borders, pnetliteratura.pt e Jornal Rascunho (www.rascunho.com.br). “Colisões Bestiais Particula(res)” (“Collisions in Particles, a Bestiary”) was published by Editora Confraria do Vento in January 2015 and as “Colisiones Bestiales” in Spanish by Diaz Grey Editores @ McNally and Jackson, Soho, New York in March, 2016. A new book, Jogos (Ben)ditos e Folias (Mal)ditas (“Blessed Games, Cursed Follies”) was officially launched by Editora Confraria do Vento at the international literary fair of Poços de Caldas, Flipoços in May 2017. Kátia is a frequent guest writer at the West Point Academy and Columbia University
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I
For the stride that she was soulless, yielding to the traffic of artificial plants cruising from the Dollar Tree store in-and-out how fast the arms moved to uphold the light vases, she was visited by angels with fully blown wings, some of them footless on either side of the limb, why - for these flyers had no Baudelairean intention and did not measure frontiers by footsteps.
She, in her minuscule life of solitude, sought to drink just the essence of satiety and establish conversation with her legs and thighs, whilst drinking tea from a cup with a warm soul, and the sandals, the sandals were so fierce, having remained by the door on the verge to the outside.
All the while, the heart sinks in, to ocean depths,
And she says: I sink like a foreign object, a residue of metaphysical plastic like the Dollar tree plants, thrown in from the place of nowhere, where she could have said to be from somewhere, where in the least her name and manners were comprehended without stare, as I stare at Woolf’s bleached mark on the wall, a serpent, a woman with vestiges from Eve’s unglamorous purple dress, I hear forty nine bells ringing a master’s call
Her cataract eyes see the glaring of a vanished soul on its voyage, where she expected a rite of return of sorts, to rise as definite shade the size of an expanded eye, or two, or many.
And yet the soul refused to march on as soldier in the exodus, it refuted complicity; had she known any of that, about twilights and dawns without the spirit, about geographic buttons that one presses in a garment, so unlike the dress she wore, had she been wiser, she would have simply chosen another outfit, to flare up her longed for soul.
II
what simulates words like effervescence, soap bubbles, polished goblets, the light force of hands washing glass? at the same time, we with our fully suspended feet distill indolence. how unable and nonchalant, some angels, would say. and yet they fly in disorientation so to blame us. the mask of guilt fits easily on faces we carry. in a glance, an angel pops up on the railing. outside, the superior agility of boats based on the fluctuations of dormant compasses.
do recall angels in the first act so that their births protect us. an angel in the rear. undefined purity in the air, healthy bodies not braised, eyes twist. freedom does not bend, the system was unconvinced.
try talking the clouds into changing rhythm, to resist the Siroco perennially moved by Montale’s echoed screams.
on a sandstorm day, the horse is carried on the shoulders of a boy. an old man whistles, stubbornly cracking his fingers. his last confession explained why he performed the blowing up of unlit candles. the action of mocking a possibly blind old man led some to their death because they laughed too hard, to the point of exploding their purple bowels, a non-spectacle. in spite of the fact that he judged his actions worthwhile and admired the silence digged by his weak hands, he would have been a finked old man, incapable of lightening a flame and shamelessly blaming the match for its shortness.
a coldness ran behind his neck. oh the fear of one winged self and its inventions.
Columbo’s egg predicted by Cassandra under the rain, an egg invented for the guillotine melted by the viscous sweat of snails.