Support Diana Villa
Sadly Diana is fighting cancer and needs our support. 10% of our sales will be donate to her treatment.
A little bit of her here:
Diana trained as a Business Administrator and later as a Psychologist. In 2014, she completed an academic exchange with the Faculty of Philology at the University of Seville. Finally, in January 2017, she settled in Madrid, where she trained as a Specialist in Psychoanalytic Clinic and Psychotherapy.
In Madrid, she published her first poetry book: Reguero de calcita (2017), Danzar en el abismo, BajAmar Editores (2018); La ilusión de los ahogados (2019); Palabras Primitivas (2020); and Amanece (2022). Her five books form an emotional account of the way the poet lives, feels, perceives, and relates to the world and its inhabitants.
She is part of the poetry collection La Generación del 22: a showcase of 10 women poets who rise as a new artistic movement. In 2024, she returned to Medellín, her place of origin, and co-founded the multicultural, plurinational, and multi-experiential project Madreletra. She currently teaches psychology at the University of Antioquia.
Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/cuerposqueescriben/?hl=en
Here is a sample of her poems:
If You Saw Me Now
If you saw me now,
joyful like a breath of invisible dawns,
clinging to an apple tree,
panting all the way to my soul,
with desolate masses.
Searching for my cracks behind my throat.
Swaying, trembling,
asleep in a garden without the light of dead whores.
Playing at being a poem, a sibyl of nothingness,
of unhealthy whims,
of invented stories.
Entertaining time with the scraps of dusk
while everything, even the body,
bathes itself in pessimism.
Measure slips away
and my day fills with nothing but thought.
Sometimes bitterness, anger,
madness.
Delivering speeches I direct to my feet,
the only thing that exists beneath me.
With a pale weariness in my temples,
ruined and useless like wet paper.
Twisted in on themselves.
The soul, unbound,
runs like a madwoman through the house.
I sew my arteries with threads of ash.
If you saw me now,
believing you were my entire surroundings,
stretching out my hands to see if I touch you,
if I reach you,
if you finally light the chimney built of ice.
Trying with the moon and the shadows
to find you.
But the truth,
always terrifying,
imposes itself as dawn alone imposes itself.
It became a habit to be the melancholy
that seeks its resting place.
I was beginning to forget
that you were already dead.
The Bare Forehead Against the Glass
We become no one again each night,
mysteriously no one.
We fall silent,
we do nothing but fall silent.
The ants put on helmets to go to work every day,
they protect themselves from the rain,
ants marching in a line down the highway.
Cotton candy dissolves in the rain and a child is left longing.
Breadcrumb.
The child envies the pigeons.
An invisible breeze strikes our insides.
A bird lost its flock and never knew it.
It never knew, either, that it was a bird.
A falling leaf, fallen.
Water spilled from the glass.
There is silence, yes,
but so much fear.
As a girl I cultivated a sadness that still hasn’t learned to leave.
Then I discovered that love killed love.
We live and love sunk in sarcophagi,
we think we wake, but we remain motionless in the tomb
earned by the sweat of our brows,
and sometimes life ambushes us without our knowing.
We rise,
but we are condemned to failure.
We separate consciousness from words on our way to disaster.
We aspire to silence, but keep talking.
We never stop talking, yet we want silence
and the lizards die in our mouths.
“Now that I’m dead, I resemble myself more.”
Poor dead man with his bare forehead upon the glass.
He advances tick tock tick tock tick tock.
He does not stop advancing tick tock tick tock tick tock.
And even so, despite everything,
we place our forehead once more upon the glass
to become mysteriously
no one each night,
to fog our corneas,
to call the ghosts hanging on the walls,
watching us from the walls.
There is silence, yes,
but so much fear.
That lightning might pierce the roof,
or the atomic pot explode,
or the child fall from the window,
or the glass shatter —the one the man presses his bare forehead against every night—
from lightning that pierced the roof
and blew up the pot that hurled the child
from the window.
We revel in lies.
We walk speaking across the avenues like horses that neigh
and believe we are speaking, the very naive ones.
We believe we have finally said something important,
but we do not stop neighing, intrepid, full of spirit
and spoiled delight.
We marry and have three children, to be unhappy forever.
We fill ourselves with common futures, but empty futures.
We wrongly abandon the underground,
we believe we understand, but we don’t understand.
We mutilate words.
We lie.
No.
We never stop lying.
Dead of Me
Father,
dead of me.
If you had turned your anguish into words,
your genius would still be roaming the house.
And you would be an open man,
a gentleman of crystal,
fragility emanating from strength.
My father,
dead of me.
You still creep into my pillow,
we still quarrel as I sleep.
There is a memory of you enslaved to the nights.
If you had made of your anguish a song,
a horizon, a journey,
a faint sign of light.
But you insisted on being poison,
weeping, solitude,
a knot tied blind.
My father,
dead of me.
I still see you dancing through the house
with your uneven steps.
Was love so dark?
Is misfortune so heavy?
If you had made of your anguish something other than pain
with no path back.
But you insisted, above all, on no longer being.
On falling in love with nothingness.
My father,
dead of me.
Did terror slip through your fingers?
Did you walk barefoot over glass?
Did you take as a route a labyrinth with no exit,
a hiding from life,
a burning in the chest with no point of departure?
Are you contemplating our mystery now?
Are you a king in heaven?
Do you watch, condescending, all our sins?
Or are you nothing now.
Not crying,
not uproar,
not observed dawn,
not wind,
not spell of so much death.
Nothing.
My father,
dead of me.
Do you still make nonsensical jokes among the clouds?
Do you still make others laugh with your sadness inside?
Or are your footprints this wandering without direction,
this being poorly exiled,
this summoning death,
absence,
the final blow.
My father,
dead of me.
Will you return to being a man among so many dead?
If you had made your anguish into words,
you would be like me,
neither worse nor better.
Just searching for life without finding it yet.
Prisoner of silence, of solitude,
of the anguish of myself.
Father,
my life,
my death.
I swear I still love you.
Prayer in the Silence
May every passerby know their glass
and the fragility of the being they inhabit.
May the deserted streets enter my home.
May everything rise,
may life reappear.
May everything follow the quiet path of its steps
and may I remain here, motionless, transparent,
continuing with the things that stir up chaos.
May your sun not go out.
May death leave or arrive in love.
May the blue of your hands be impenetrable
and may the mirage find its voice between the wings.
What shadows,
what tremors,
what insurgent furies!
May the hundred thousand grenades that explode in the mornings
leave us their memory and die forever.
May so many black clouds rise from the throat
and may the sky spill and caress my belly.
May my gaze accompany you to the depths
and may the sphinx suspect the vague exegesis.
How trembling,
how vertiginous,
how lacking in decorum!
May hallucination become equal to instinct,
and spleen carve out a place and sign off on sadness.
If my scar stretches to infinity
let it devour this fear of pit and storm.
May the cracks open and madness bubble up,
and may the blind man shudder from so much light at the center.
How dense,
how longing,
how vibrant and serene!
May my death shake off every stupor I bear.
May my lost light rise with you
and may your sky finally sway within my thoughts.
May I rise proud beneath the earth.
May my death strangle all this pain inside
and may the rain at last fall upon this hungry land.
We Remain Cold
We despise men,
we do not seek what we find,
yet we find it and keep dirtying ourselves with our tears.
We don’t know how,
but the same stones bruise our knees,
and there is a loneliness we cannot bear.
We trespass forbidden lands,
burst like beasts,
and fall defeated on the ground to bite the dust.
We strangle innocent creatures with our own hands,
abandon those born from our womb
so they may die of hunger, or thirst, or absence.
We shoot men,
and the trumpeters who are like men
in small boys’ bodies,
and we sell fragile child bodies to other men
and throw them into the dark
to survive.
And we castrate men,
we weaken them, we poison them.
We burn women at the stake
and abandon them again,
for the first abandonment was not enough,
and we beat them,
pour acid on their faces to disfigure the beauty
that hypnotizes us.
We invade Shanghai with brutality,
without a trace of mercy,
and let others die of starvation,
and burn the fields to bring hell to earth,
and turn the wide rivers into swamps,
and murmur afterward things that are not true,
and speak.
We remain locked in cages so they will give us
a piece of bread,
we do not want to fly, we fear hunger,
fear becoming beggars incinerated by the fire
that annihilates behind the window.
And we hate men,
we despise them, we feel disgust.
We remain cold and abandon the flesh
to strip the days
in the agony of the spirit.
But we also run,
we run, we breathe,
we blink at the flashes of light
that feed what is at the center as vibration,
as tremor, as omen.
We miss the rain
and flutter like hummingbirds
in search of a trace of God, as the chrysalides
give birth to blue.
And we walk across dry and cracked lands
wanting, like rivers, to snake through the world
beneath coral reefs.
And we submerge our feet in trembling waters
and pray to the stars
and climb to the treetops where larks
and nightingales sing
and we make pilgrimages and we walk, we walk
until our feet burn and ache.
And the road transforms our gaze.
And we fall silent.
We fall silent and let the light speak
and let the birds sing
and we cry sitting at the shore
and stretch out our hands to the unprotected
and we sing, we sing, we sob.
We hold our breath,
we crumble with the afflicted
and we write,
we write for the dead,
for for the living we could not.
And we bury the dead,
and we place flowers on their graves
and we make prayers that save us.
And we preserve a faith that had been broken,
yet we preserve it
wrapped in its own mystery.
And we fall silent,
we fall silent before a language asphyxiated by itself.
And we write.
We wrote.
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