Pez-Girasol / Graciela Bonnet

Sunflower-Fish

You come from the night, in the middle of sleep, you say you’re a sunflower fish that emerges displaying a tail of sand, the tip of the fin, which is also a petal, which is also a leaf.
You come from the other side of the room, which at dawn is an infinite space, a desert like you’ve never seen before, complete desolation, the glare of closed eyelids, the sheets are superimposed solid doors closed to that other reality, the one that comes from sleep, turning in thousands of superimposed images, while you say you’re the sunflower fish buried in the sand in the back yard, amid the tilled dirt waiting for seeds, dampened so it’ll explode in a thicket of leaves.
It doesn’t matter anymore what was hidden behind those doors of memory, it doesn’t exist. If you finally open them, there’ll be nothing hidden, so nothing will be able to hurt you.
And tomorrow when the sun rises we’ll pray the waves in the patio, to the ones that pass over our heads, very high up there, lowered by the wind, the ones swimming backwards, fleeing through the clouds, sunflower fish, until the glare of the sun, until eyes closed, until never again.




{ Graciela Bonnet, Libretas doradas, lápices de carbón, Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014 }

Nos gustaba / Graciela Bonnet

We liked watching the night from the window.
It was a window that opened to the city’s valley and you could see a multitude of lights shinning or turned off.
You were saying behind those lights there was life, people were loving and dying, hating and being born.
I know. I didn’t need to lean out the window to understand there were people in the city who lived their tragedies and their unimportance each day. There was nothing we could do, no matter how much we insisted on staring out the window every night, and repeating to ourselves there were a multitude of lives in the darkness; we couldn’t even understand the moment, the close coincidence threaded in the world allowing us to do that, simply sit together and watch the night, on no particular day, at any window, in an anonymous city.




{ Graciela Bonnet, Libretas doradas, lápices de carbón, Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014 }

Juan Liscano / Graciela Bonnet

Juan Liscano
January, 2001

The water’s murmur rushing through the rocks.
The sunny patio, with its rocking chair, its half-finished paintings, its wooden or clay figurines.
The living room sofa with a blanket woven in vivid colors.
The angled window, right by the just-cleaned kitchen, everything calm and ready for a nap.
The smell of the sheets ironed, folded and put away with camphor tablets, a branch of lavender or a cinnamon clove.
An ancient chest, a hobby horse, the dinning room table, a cage sleeping on the windowsill.
The board in the middle with the half empty glasses.
Those words that spoke of a loosed youth.
Of a love until death, of a thought, of a thought
The book that was left open forever.
Paintings, postcards, letters, photographs, music, newspaper clippings
Everything has a face, a voice that speaks to me from inside and tells me goodbye, never, no more.




{ Graciela Bonnet, Libretas doradas, lápices de carbón, Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014 }

Eugenio Montejo / Graciela Bonnet

Eugenio Montejo
June, 2008

We’re born with a few feelings and sensations that make us unique in the universe.
Since we enjoy life, we soon understand the deal involves negotiating what we have so death might not take us so soon. Thus, we keep renouncing our things in exchange for death allowing us a little more life.
One day it keeps our simplicity, and eventually it will seem fine to us when it takes our freshness, strength and confidence.
In the end, when we have nothing left, besides a pile of broken bones, we understand that it’s time we returned to our old residence.




{ Graciela Bonnet, Libretas doradas, lápices de carbón, Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014 }