Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2016, The Orlando Museum of Art
_____
you
who’ve read Dante in folio
you let yourself drift
through those little drawings
so-called illuminated miniatures
and you swallowed it all
all
from ay
to bi
but it’s a lie
that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish
made on purpose to make you waste time
calculating in which circle
the bones of your soul
will end up
and you know something?
this famous inferno
has an admirable simplicity
it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning
you get there and they tell you
you’re free
go ahead and do as you like
The [preceding] poems come from Rebekah Smith’s […] translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa.
