The sculptor of Syros wanted me slender as a stake

silent as clay

immobile in my bones

arms crossed on the threshold of the infinite

Woman or statue, what's the difference!

With a liquefied face

the slit of my womb sealed shut the sculptor of Syros wanted me

The dead don't desire each other

don't penetrate each other

useless to engender more dead

The earth, filled to the brim, barricaded its door

Let the surplus ones bury themselves with their own hands in a hole in the air

Closed in between two layers of earth

I could draw the world without moving my hand

movements borrowed from disused beings

I sketched a creek from the crashing of the backwash on the rocks

a grove of trees from the wind's noise as it pulled the branches’ hair

city streets from wooden clogs trampling the tender and the dry

Dead, I recognised trees by their odour

acrid for the jujube tree

bitter for the cypress

acid, the elder-tree that grows in cemeteries […]