I SEE THE BEAUTY by Diego Lama, Translated from Italian by Rose Facchini

Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the bottom. Then I climb back up to the pot of water on the fire and cook breakfast, lunch, dinner. I eat fifty, seventy, ninety cockroaches a day. I also make a good, dark, bitter, thirst-quenching, nutritious broth from them. The cockroaches feed on my waste, I feed on them. Every day, I go for long walks through the sludge in search of more food for my farm: human excrement, remains of dead animals, or shapeless things. And then I collect fuel to keep the fire burning. This is my life. No one ever comes near. They are afraid, disgusted, pitying, horrified. They are shortsighted and confused, all moving towards their end, even if they run away in different directions. They run away and do not see the beauty. I do not run away. I see. And then, at sunset—gray, blurry, misty—I sit on a heap of garbage and smile, because life, every life, is wonderful.