she called out              for father
but it was        mother who came.

the walls of the city     had been

painted blood red.

scenes of destruction              were everywhere,
and families,          even armies, indulging

their last supper,         a field strewn

 with wine goblets, plates broken,  

 bones              of boar and quail.

  (this was before they invented perspective)

lastly a vision:

a dark coiling              corridor

and a single atrium,

splattered in

light.

Miriam Adelman was born in Milwaukee, but has lived most of her life outside the U.S. (including 9 years in Mexico, and the thirty some that she has now been living in Brazil). Recently retired from teaching Sociology at a Brazilian public university, she is now freer than ever to devote herself to other passions:  photography, visual anthropology, and writing and translating poetry. In 2020 she published her first book of poetry, the bilingual volume Found in Translation (Nosotros Editorial) and in 2021, a Brazilian Portuguese translation of Denise Duhamel’s Kinky  (Mundo Barbie, Edições Jabuticaba, with Julia Raiz and Emanuela Siqueira).