Today’s guest post is by Luís Costa, a wonderfully talented poet and good friend of mine. I asked Luís around a month ago if he’d be interested in doing a guest post, and he accepted very graciously and swiftly. I’m honoured to have him on the newsletter!
Luís’ poem is something of a response to Wisława Szymborska’s Kot w pustym mieszkaniu, “Cat in an empty apartment”, the text of which can be found in translation here. I’d encourage you to go and read Szymborska’s poem alongside Luís’, as it is both a clever dialogue with Luís’ poem and a wonderful poem in its own right (it was new to me, I’m not that familiar with Szymborska’s work). “Cat in an empty apartment” is a humorous and tender examination of loss as seen through the eyes of a cat. Luís’ poem takes that idea one step further, and asks us what it is like to mourn something even less substantial than a person — a dream.
Luís’ debut pamphlet will be published by 14poems on 27 November. Keep an eye out for it!
Sonnet for a dream
“Dying – you can’t do that to a cat!” — Wisława Szymborska
Today we dug out a dream that lived inside the grave
of Szymborska. It could not decide if it wanted to be
rain. Sour as fermented cucumbers, it was hesitating
like the sky. It then invaded cigarette smoke, warm
balcony air, and the birthday party roars dissipating
into the night. When it joined the clouds, it told me
that postcards from Seville would have arrived now,
had we gone. Finally, it was water, crawling drizzle,
warm sweat. Even a shy condensation in the glasses.
All of it forgotten, our hands were clasped so firmly,
blood dancing around the fingers. We swam within
it, like the changing of the seasons, drowning in our
own cold sheets. And in the morning, the poet said
this to us: waking up – you can’t do that to a dream!
Luís Costa (he/they) is an anxious queer poet featured multiple times in Visual Verse, Stone of Madness and Queerlings, as well as in Inksounds, Farside Review and FEED. Longlisted for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry in 2022, his debut pamphlet Two Dying Lovers Holding A Cat will be published by Fourteen Poems in November 2023. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Goldsmiths and lives in London with his cat Pierożek. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.