The woman comes
in her winding sheet, her shroud. An antique corset cuts into her softening
flesh, the tiny bones fragile and painful. Her nine days’ elegy begins in Blood
Forest.
Her fingertips
are stained the colour of mourning, azalea-dark. The soil is running with dark
juices, there is dirt on the hem of her gold party dress.
She is ready to
lie down.
She has
researched murder ballads. Almost every traditional song is set in the forest,
the woods, the corrupted idyll. The most common way is strangulation, her
throat between his flat palms. Almost as popular is the knife, the gore bluing
the tip of his weapon, the grass stained purple. There are ballads where there
is the feeling of a blunt instrument, a rock, a piece of forest quartz, the
decayed and calcified white stump of a tree. This murder ballad she is writing
is for the forest itself, for the blood-red rhododendron.
Haga, the woman learns, means enclosure, a portion of woodland marked off
for cutting. Haga becomes hawthorn,
quickthorn, thorn-apple, May-Tree,
hawberry:
a supernatural portal, where the hag straddles the boundary of both
worlds, is a hedge-rider or a witch or a ghost. She is a hægtesse: a woman of prophecy. Oracle.
Alone. Of heart failure. Of internal bleeding and liver damage. After
drowning himself in the sludge of the Seine. After losing grip on the slate of
the roof, two weeks after la fête nationale. Of intestinal
breakdown and abdominal swelling. Upon severing the ulnar artery after dismal
sales and a lack of readership. From cancer. Of a heart attack. Four years
after his wife. From bronchial congestion. From a perforated ulcer. At home.
After being run over by a laundry van. From heart failure. From lung cancer.
From heart failure. In Tel Aviv. After a cerebral hemorrhage. From liver
cancer. From post-operative cardiac arrhythmia. After complications from
surgery. Of Parkinson’s Disease. From AIDS. After a stroke. After a stroke.
From lung cancer. From non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After a heart attack. From
prostate cancer. From breast cancer. After a heart attack. Of old age. Of
chronic lymphocytic leukemia. From complications from liver surgery. At home.
From liver failure. From pancreatic cancer. From pneumonia. Alone in a garden.
After complications from cancer. From heart failure. From prostate cancer.
After a week in the hospital. From pneumonia. After a long illness. After a
stroke. From cancer. Of natural causes. From pancreatic cancer. Of natural
causes, alone.
congregated to sanction the shredding of an_ti_ci_pa_tion* deferment, fermentation, shunter
can you see them? on the porch?
yeah, but they don’t wave
its almost time
shucks
buttercup
cartwheels
licensed
incense
guided
and misguided
like the broken acrylic nail in her palm;
she’s precious and
useless.
come now
let’s go say ‘hi’
*
Chebet Fataba writes and has been published in Burning House Press and on the youth-led African feminist network As Equals Africa. You can find her stories on djembequest.wordpress.com
Tall grass on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I am saddened. Ancient evils inside me. I vomited on my shirt sleeve. I was on the ground … outside someone’s house. They came and picked me up in a Honda Odyssey … that I remember. I continued to vomit on my shirt sleeve. I slide my thumb along the gun handle. Manhattan during a frozen moment. This filthy city. My eyes as sore eyes. My skin as pale skin. Explosive slugs enter my body. The unbreathable atmospheres of NYC. Radioactive elements inside the subway. The next room is a dark room. Your skin tenses … your stomach tightens … this vomiting … your face flushes … the mind shuts down … your phone screen flashes. The sea breathes. The floor is stained with water. An infinitesimally tiny amount of black shit. I push my finger into the water … the air around me. NYC is radioactive … the city is a dark … damp room … a tiny amount of black shit in the corner. I am not youthful anymore. I long to roll in the high grass again. Youthful voices in the high grass. Meteorites overhead. The marble pillars of the sex shop … the cool recesses of the X-rated cinema … the air-tight tomb of the dirty magazines. I don’t think I have ever seen an office on this level before. There are windows … in the centre are two big cabinets containing several small office items. The cabinets are divided by desks and chairs … it seems most common … they are filled with books or papers. Meteorites made from marble pillars. A tiny man in a dark suit. I wear black jeans … I take a deep breath. You don’t deserve praise. A pulsing field over the Bronx. The blood does not flow. There is a room for me. It is completely enclosed. Nothing is happening to me. There is a tiny man. He seems to be wearing a dark suit … there isn’t a light switch … not even a single window. What is happening is… I am still in my room … my life isn’t going anywhere. The man in the suit says something … I don’t remember much about what it was … because in his mind … I am gone. Nino deals in terrible reality … such horror … the machinery of his insides … the soft fields of his slight help. I am in Manhattan … I vomit on my shirt sleeve … this is a frozen moment … I feel sick again … this filthy city. My sore eyes … my pale skin … these explosive … unbreathable atmospheres. It is a horrible day full of inhuman indignity. I am tired and bored. The room is a dim … empty one … with a window open. The light source is out. The walls are damp and greyish. An ice cream cart is parked directly behind the wall. A guy sits down … this person eats from a blue ice cream cone. I move toward the door. I open it and look around. Inside the room is a very … very thin guy. He wears black jeans and a t-shirt with no socks. You take a deep breath … you tell me that you deserve praise for the sex last night. I don’t think so … whirlwinds through my skin. I don’t even know where to start. I know this because we know it already and we’re being played. I am in the Bronx … it smells like oil. I’m surrounded by a pulsing field. A pulsing field that cuts into my heart with the intensity of almost a million. It cuts through my blood flow … my blood and my lungs fill into the pulsing field. It is so bright … so pure and yet un-human and I am unable to respond. I begin breathing deeply. My skin tenses … it feels cold and sticky. My stomach tightens with sickness … my face flushes. My mind shuts down. My eyes are shut. Los Angeles full of ancient evils. My shirt sleeve dragging on the ground. I am inside someone’s house. I am asleep inside a Honda Odyssey. There it is … the pulsing field. I reach into my pocket and pull my phone out. My phone screen flashes with a red and white image. I stare at a portrait of my favourite artist … I stare at that picture of me and the world. I stare at the thing that created me … I sit on the bed of the ocean … feeling the sea breathe through me. I stare into something. I stare into water. I stare at the ocean. There are some things I need before I make love to you … I need to see you … but you are always there … over there … away from here … so here’s a video of an orgasm. I miss you Nino. I prefer you unclothed.
Survey the demolishing current, then in response feed the muscular fabric of love hand over hand far reach skeins that silk the terrain and therein we don’t get anxious to own each other any longer I just want to drive and talk all night and feel this landscape breathe in my overswell
I’m so nostalgic for the grayshot time we could walk body through veil the time death was no prerequisite for getting down / under the tipped up starry bowl in the grass or sand bowl in the hollow of the sea god’s iliac crest I won’t lie back / won’t lie / I’m comforted by the tactile embrace love’s ripped arm about my shoulder a spell against feelings against my own ambition slingshot straight up into the night to Orion’s cool scowl kiss not / don’t kiss me now if you don’t like it I’ve had your tongue in mine a deal to pass the night companionable no inquiry all query the quarry deep maw of someone / else
or
my bull-faced tender
friend palms / in his minotaur palm his great bowl of a grasp his own heart big
and throbbing a set piece I take it on the tongue I take it despite heft I /
muscle / beating muscle word-seeking muscle vast muscle forged in a cold room
by witch-poor persons by no one really / muscle that grew wild in the field and
loose in the road according only to its own fibrous longing / I take it / hot
on the tongue and mouth around the curse more beauty more brutality and swallow
what I can I’ll take it / back with me the road from desert to sea that
everyone must travel that only a few of us walk in reverse I want / to drive it
blazing but I follow rigor and walk its ruts and witness each unlike life
unfolding not just forward and back but also infinite weft to even
more infinite warp what am I doing here pausing by the gates to there I’m
still / I’m still required here
or
lift my skirt my back
pressed into fast iron gates my skin heated by abandon / abandoned lovers
lost things press me / press me deeply into the moment before I have to return
to / living at the edge of the road with my hand extended to travelers
offer and clutch I cannot hold fast / enough lovers enough daughters enough of
law and sacrifice nothing gets done in the sympathetic dark tonight
instead put me in love’s big arm and incant like you mean it friends tell
me / tell me we have lived far enough over / it’s safe to loose my heart on you
tell me / this love is different from previous loves because now we’re all
dying / a dirge one sings to herself a demeter is up early at the door she
doesn’t want to come in she wants to know if it’s really the hour of living and
what we’ll do at dark with all that salt the weeping leaves on the bodies our
bodies salt for lovers and salt for wounds I can’t bear / another wound / so
say nothing / just pulse beside me pulse inside me my pulse ebbing against
my need I don’t / need you to feel this / same coordinate I need you to spell
it out I need to recite the spell of your names and to recite my lover’s names
to give
men and gods the same
number to reach me to spell my name out in the bowl’s bonefresh
gully I press /
press my bruise to / Orion’s cold lip he / heals me not and hurts me not / and
knotted up against his thigh I am / crossing into the orbit of beauty’s least
known form
or
lift my body that wears
the young cow’s hide and rides like youth and gives light jobs high on the /
rise above the inn the guests can’t see me if they don’t look back and they
don’t / look there what am I doing with shade beauty hanging out by myself
wondering how my tongue got so stained with feeling / I saw my tender friends
assembled on a blue screen I saw numbers accumulate in spells and promises not
grand promises nothing that protects me from / this belief
that every day must include / pain / nothing / the white memory wiping through the present moment gone static gone still in the rush of huntblood / I hear / a wave / will crash tonight / the heavens a wave of starjunk and haters come down the back of Orion’s soft neck my throat too lifted / what could I do but offer you things / what could you do but / refuse me I’m spiral and filled with needles the dark needles that knit the night her angsty skirt that knit your tongue to mine when you fall too long silent I won’t / open my mouth to set you free nor close my teeth to / I resolve to sit so very still back to throne back to thigh back to pulsing muscle as though I don’t hear you I hear you I just want to drive now
Danielle Pafunda is author of nine books including the recent Beshrew (Dusie Press), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books). She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Photograph is from performance by Leif Holmstrand.
I ubëred
to Topanga. Pinkheat, dust and iced-tea got stuck very practically no cars headed the other way. Call it “Narrative Lost” what did you smell pre-teen runaway
drunk on the grass somebody’s
yard in the valley. Ocean, mallbreeze
ocean-draw, drive-thru
Capital
One. Money dressed-up the
palms. The night smells like fire and it’s not our identities burning. Did
we know how we made real things by pretending to dream? Night smells like seasalt, watchdog on the
cul-de-sac. Salt tastes like skin. Ocean
a mouthful of bodies. Cold sand
smelled like silence. In the
too-familiar I began
not existing. Within objects. The table setting pulls back from my
hands. The sun draws back its life. Nothing fed but our scars. The cars, their stability turns to
wild water turns light hands in the red this scope is longer this weird daylight
of end. Landscape of bloodsugar vertigo thigh muscle sensitized wound since you
left my
bones are heavier.
New gravity. Nude bra.
A summer. Sweat collector babydoll tee arc
of a parking
lot, edge of the
concrete its summer crumbling side where we sat thinking forever as ever like anything
else we did, we assumed Romeo, Romeo more than a
thrill…
Romeo, echo delta this edge of my scalp skin set to: want. A degree in “to keep.” People moving away back into the lines outside of a Best Buy. The 90’s. New York or Baltimore sounds like our youth turning worldwide on digital radio. Who
wasn’t still isn’t afraid? My body
remembers discharging itself into the sharper kind of grass.
The white nights, white
teeth hypnic jerk. Descartes in a darkroom I, too, am sure I’m awake taking pictures but not of what this reminds me. Siri’s confused. I look out the window. Just snow light. No image so.
Or is it a swimming pool
season, location, et cetera
slithery pool light any body of water slip your heat in and draw back the wet bundle
drenched with “and” silence and silence and familiar
silence. Whiskey [I am]
[I don’t] hotel [I
know, I know] [What is] Yankee
candle, flattened
pillow. Smudge in my palm says
uncertainly, “Never.” [I know] [I am]
We watched that film “The
Swimming Pool.” I saw a picture of my body Really
Naked [who’s that] from the back [I turned]
17 that year online. Call it
“Narrative Cost” defrosting
in darkness edited
hypnic jerk. As I begin not existing
… Watch this: the men piss on a
woman good old flickering firelight
and last of all your ex
steps forward as he unbuckles… Someone’s
always making the arc of contact towards
flesh. My art
history teacher said
Lee’s douche hung in the
bathroom. Night smelled like pine… dead
fire… piss… [I turn] [say won’t] [I wrote] “No Point.” A large circle drawn in pencil somewhere inside…
nowhere is nope. Narrative
won’t. A scene she wrote…
actress angrily
masturbating after a fight. They laugh. Okay, that’s dignity call it a wrap. Later, I surrender my boots in
a parking lot. In a dark room, watching my life’s world side
turn. [What is] Inside joke.
Inside-out denim jacket. Denim
both sides. Denim all the way down. Her long thighs. [I wrote] Nevermind, I can’t even find
a beginning.
(Sometimes resulting in a cytokine storm). My beloved pet
chicken, Pyramid, the first time I intentionally beheaded anyone. She had hid
her wound under her wing. “She” will always hide her wound under her wing,
that’s what “she” means.
I took a big swing with the hatchet and hoped to hit hard
enough for a merciful clean cut. We thought she would struggle so we wrapped
her body in a towel and he held her tight. We thought she would struggle but
she didn’t. She rested her head on the log, utterly still, and looked into my
eyes as I held the hatchet over her. I split the empty space between her head
and body again because I wasn’t sure I had been merciful enough.
Her head was easy to find.
The blood was brown as mud. In a few days it would have been
black. But now it was brown on the little log we chose to chop her on. Flies
began to harvest the rotten blood right away. He swatted them away. “It’s ok,”
I said to him. “Someone has to eat
it,” as if someone had to eat it.
I walked a few feet away for some reason and dropped to the
ground, easy to find. I cried, now that it was done and I was allowed to soften,
being a “she” with a hidden wound. I was forced to make two bodies of her body
out of my own ignorance and he put them both in the hole. He took the towel
away to wash it, although it wasn’t dirty. He hurried to bury her two bodies and
take the towel away for another purpose while I cried.
This was before I thought the State was dying. This was
before I thought my particular structure was ever going to end. All apocalypse
fiction to me was dorky, only an occasion for heroic masturbation! Can you
imagine, now? Bacterial virulence factors allow colonization, immune evasion,
and establishment of disease in the host! He hurried to take the towel away for
another purpose!
I walked a few feet away for some reason. I don’t know where
her grave is now but I’m sure it was poorly dug since I didn’t do it myself. I
imagine her bones must be close enough to the surface for someone, not me, to
smell. This was before I paid any attention. Even this didn’t make me pay
attention.
I think about sepsis every day now. It’s the long death caused by ignorance, which is what is happening. (Current professional recommendations include a number of actions (“bundles”)) that are now too late. (I asked “what is going to happen?” and he said “it’s happening.”) For whom is it “too late”? Whose blood is already rotten brown, brown as the bark on the log covered in flies, soon black? She didn’t struggle.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Nigh (U of Iowa Press, 2010), Bandit (Grove Atlantic, 2016) and The Cipher (Pleaides Press, 2020).
The only airport departures are nurses, indeed, the goblin blue shirts are departing from the secure rear of the terminal. Not to return or noting returning to the line. The airport is frozen, freezing, free of people waiting in lines for cold water. The lines around her eyes speak to me. We will be needing vodka to wash my hands to take her hands in mine and warm them from the caster oil. I can not free her from the ethanol. The vodka is not as pure as what is inside her, vodka is not dehydrated. Vodka is cold is well known. I had not known I would do this, like this, washing down with the substance that is causing her hands to be cold. Dropping my pursed fingers into a pair of shot glasses, see how it would have to be vodka? I would be pouring the remaining cold and drying the skin even colder then. My hands are cold and colder as the vodka evaporates. I think about a baked potato. Today is a baked potato and a bad peripheral neuropathy day. The term from the cold land of oncology is peripheral neuropathy, though I think the bartender inside will not understand that we are ugly bags of mostly water and salts. I worry that she does not drink water, not nearly enough water is not enough for the nearly identical sharks inside her.
Painting white roses, I photoshopped a chicken to make her look not sick. I photographed and photoshopped a rhode island red to make her feathers more red, more crimson, more vermillion than rust. I had to make her more red and drums. More vermillion meaning more light that I was using the light to hide her inside neon red. Then is red and golden. I do not want to be the golden next generation. The grand henwife thinks the golden hen is the most beautiful, her feathers are the fire in sapphire. The rhode island red is sapphire hard. I do not want to be the golden next generation through and through and I have not driven through rhode island in the new year. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get through to the termite, the great bright termite in Christmas lights. Light and meat might be maybe the boundary. I am dreaming of dark and sticks and I had to draw on the boundary and I had to draw all the sticks that fall in between illness and health. I had to fade to where the boundary was feathers only half falling from her body. I had been dreaming that outside of the dream time it has been happening that she has been darkening and has been keeping her dark feathers to herself. She would be dark and sticks these days.
Cold is also frost. Winter is also wet things held in the head the dream is cold in the morning. Stalactite dripping to drip. A drop. A Stalagmite is the dream in the morning cold. She is the difference between dripping to drip and a drop that has been dropped down. Related to hang the head. Straw fedora to turquoise under-hat to off-white from drama. Straw from the farm. The opposite of dripping is straw from the summer. Straw of strew is to lay flat and not to be confused with hay with the longing vowel. Dry stalks the cold after and afterwards. Bale or bundle held in twine, dried straw presents a fire hazard as it would. If someone dried and polished straw long enough, then it would feel like this sweater. I wore this sweater the day it was warm enough to walk outside. I forgot to worry about the water boiler. If I worry over the boiler enough, I might find the right thing to say. I wore this sweater the day before the dream and it was dry. If I worry over her pipes freezing enough, I might find the right thing to say. All I have is saying the right thing, right like straw polished and polished and the third is not given.
Julia Rose Lewis is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017). James Miller and she co-authored Strays (Haverthorn 2017). She has published the pamphlets Zeroing Event (Zarf Poetry 2016), Exhalation Halves Lambda (Finishing Line Press 2017), How to Hypnotize a Lobster (Fathom Books 2018), Archeology and the Beast (Luminous Press 2018), and Miscellaneous (Sampson Low 2019).
I’m at this journal launch party and people keep ignoring that I am in the issue of the journal that the party is for but what’s going on here I don’t remember this journal oh i’m dreaming the only person who seems excited about these poems is ch who is passing me in a conga line & the woman behind him looks exactly like Mary J Blige ch was happy I was annoyed then confused then relieved and glad no one in the room seemed to know or care who I was except Sara Jane Stoner who had solicited the work–publishing is not as fun as it used to be it does not feel the same I used to want to celebrate & now it’s like oh look I did it oh look I did it oh look I did it I did it I did it:::: for a long time I was not sure I was going to survive I was not sure that I was any good & I feel an unrelenting drive to succeed to be good enough to earn love///I want people to realize how important it is to pay attention to refuse to become an accomplice<<<Shay burned all of my journals in the backyard she couldn’t read them because I made a code so that the words would be protected & I came home from school to ashes in a trashbin & she grinned she grinned and gloated oh look i did it oh look i did it & I could not cry no I just deadened myself inside I was already dead inside scooped myself out empty empty & she knew that writing was all I wanted to do>>>or maybe it’s that when people disrespect me I do not want to internalize it to be able to say the way people see me is not me the way people treat me is not me people do not even fucking know me it’s like how Tyler in a Good Friday homily said that Jesus was someone so intensely and uniquely living the truth of their identity and that was radical then & it’s still radical now & then I think about how Jive said I had the power to make people face the truth about themselves & then how dark the first season finale of Black Jesus got because it seems like Jesus could just be a homeless mentally ill Black man in Compton but it only looks like that if you refuse to believe he is who he says he is. I’m always trying to be who I say I am and I don’t think I live up to the hype it’s like how Nanami becomes the land god of the shrine in Kamisama Kiss but she doesn’t always trust her power as a land god because she still has the body and thoughts and feelings of a girl in high school & I never thought it was weird that there is no canonical gospel account of Jesus between childhood & the start of their ministry at thirty it takes such a long time to become to be comfortable with who you are and everything else in the world and I know that but I still get frustrated with myself & my body & my feelings///saw the same mother & daughter on the bus I make it to campus on time I’m sweaty or like dewy after I go to the library it rains a little bit I send a few emails then walk with Walser
“Why is it that black women are always writing about trauma?”
I was thirteen when Shay burned my
journals. It was punishment. These were
from bookstores, they were gifts from
friends and mentors. I liked things that
were just for me (I had to share a bed
with X and Kathy). I liked to write in
something beautiful. I liked to write
everyday. I had been journaling for
four years. Suddenly holding a pen,
having paper was grounds for a beating.
Mark had been molesting me for two years.
I did not want him to put his penis inside me
and I was afraid that he would. He said
it was up to me. He had lied, before, when
he said that it
would not happen again.
I never smiled. After a poetry reading
during my sophomore year at Notre Dame,
an upperclassman, a white boy I didn’t know
told me he hoped that I would start writing
something lighter. Humiliation does
not have to be harmful. Hegemony
requests that we suffer without making a sound.
[1] Anne Spencer (Aquarius, 1882-1975) Poet,
librarian, activist. Her papers are archived at the Albert and Shirley Small
Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
[2] Nella Larsen (Aries, 1891-1964) Novelist,
nurse, librarian. Her letters are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture.
Sade LaNay (fka Murphy) is a poet and artist from Houston, TX. They are the author of Härte (Downstate Legacies) self portrait (Birds of Lace) and Dream Machine (co•im•press). This poem is from their forthcoming collection I love you and I’m not dead (Argos Books).
The
hunger makes me lightheaded. We fuck through holes in our unitards. A smile
carved in your cheeks. Your cat makeup. Dripping.
Teeth
like candy corns.
My
wig is red synthetic fibers. It’s on fire. I scream at the TV in the dressing
room mirror. I lick the security camera. I sing the national theme song:
Bargain prices.
Fire in the drug den.
Fire in the migrant van.
Fire in the Amazon.
My
urethra is loose and spills urine abundantly. It could use a tightening. A
torque-it.
In
the paradigm where production becomes the sole unit of appraisal for one’s
life, Art becomes the twin of Death.
The
health insurance rep eats my shriveled foreskins. Fork. Masque. Cotillion.
\\\\
Sun
scream. No filter. Lake bake. Face full of beetles. Scales.
I
think the drugs are kicking in.
A
moonscape where the lake completely dried. Piano wire. Cow pies. Tootsie roll
lumps seethe on your skin.
Stalk
the campsite. Nothing under my mascot suit. I’m the Forest Fire Bear! Pinch my
udders red. Fear. Athlete’s foot.
Gasoline.
Hash
inhaled through a hollowed pelvis. Ramshackle hut in the woods in which I store
my trophies. Jerseys. Clipboards.
Lore
ended when everything became the news. My face plastered all over handbags at
Fashion Week.
\\\\\
Crayon
paste in commissary Smucker’s®. Snickers in intercoms
all
night long.
Bodies
torn through like toilet paper.
Teeth
gyres. Pig parades.
In
one sense, everyone should aspire to be president. In another, nobody should.
Everyone
should strive to write the country’s tome. To sing its song & carve it into
its tomb.
When
I was a kid the pinnacle sexual experience I could imagine would be to be
devoured whole.
Nothing’s
really changed. I’m just a little older.
America.
Logan Berry is Artistic Director of the Runaways Lab, a Chicago-based experimental theater troupe, and on the leadership team of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose poetry on demand. He works the graveyard shift at a residential treatment facility for at-risk youth. His libretto, NASIM BLEEDS GREEN, is forthcoming from Plays Inverse.
train
that is the only way to orgasm, killing an animal
you
love, one you know
or
even a stranger, killing a stranger dog
like
every time you orgasm, the animal is skinned
if
the objection is to the binary choice
we
are missing the point of the dilemma
let’s
eat cupcakes at each other
with
no pants on
lick
frosting deep in each other’s eyes
buy
gold chains off the internet without breaking gaze
I’ll get what I want
Untitled
V
a
house, cursed, is a distraction
open
weeping can appear to be
in
all things
all
things
I
know enough theory
to
recognize falsehood:
even
a virus gone systemic
should
be denied agency
every
day the loop of isolation grows tighter
love
I
haven’t bothered to crack that one yet
with
a bit of leather between my teeth
hold me under
Untitled
X
when
I say no one is talking about the grief
of
fucking someone
I
mean it’s everywhere all the time
this
murderous anonymity
the
relief of uncoupling too obvious
an
embarrassment of riches
for
the moment between when the fist lands
and
the bloom of knowledge that follows
I
wanted to grieve the way I wanted to fuck him
the
truth is, the truth is too simple for what happened
I
needed to lie and to grieve the lie as well
to
suckle the child—to feel my body multiply
as
if I could feed a waiting crowd
Amie Zimmerman lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Salt Hill, and BathHouse Journal, among others. She has two chapbooks, Oyster (REALITY BEACH) and Compliance (Essay Press), and is an editor for YesYes Books.
Photograph is from a performance by Leif Holmstrand.
Three poems from Nomos,
chapter “Rimsmedsvägen 36B, Kalmar”.
THE
KITCHEN. Mother’s sister’s scissors, in a plastic case. Blood pudding with
bacon and lingonberries to pancakes with home-stirred chocolate sauce. With
Arabia in sepia. The images faded, yellow, maybe hardened or with the memory.
As you shaved your beard and terrified me. Like coffee in a small cup, with
both cow’s milk and sugars. A small blue cup, I gave it to my son. Jeans and
glasses all. On hooks — boards. Happiness has always propagated itself amongst
macaroni; amongst heavy fir tables, with mannered and well-crocheted and joyous
tablecloths. All things in plastic. It was cloths, circled; plastic. The
honey-sweet milk of Sugar Puffs — a heaven compared to
Christ-our-saviour/Pale-incompetence-hanging-on-a-cross. Plastic surrounded
everything I learned. Even the sun. I squinted towards the sun, even cut into,
as at the hospital.
THE
STANDPIPE WATER TOWER WAS VISIBLE FROM ALL OVER THE QUARTER. It stood there
like a mushroom, its view was the whole world; the world was not great, it kept
at home. We — the church — the fall. Where the shadow was at most sharp. Leafs
thread over the feet against the ground, lost — I was often lost. High slopes,
trees. I was alone after closing time, I was always last. At last you were
there. I recognise tables, mattresses, plaster-dogs; kindergarten games, which
became weeks of utopia against the school yard. You were strange, a stranger. I
ran. I ran away. With salt dough, towards colourful desolate zones; lines lined
the floor — frames like those framing the pedagogy, I was also framed, inbound,
but much later.
THE
MALL AND THE SECOND FREEDOM. The dreams shifted shape, became fantasies shared
with others, became bulk and searching, compromising. Down in nooks, into
salinity — sweetness, a carbon based life form. One of us fractured his foot
through the glass door, within and without; the loading docks and the rosaries
beyond recognition: someone else’s older sister, phones ringing, vhs, Berga
Centre, I could not always hold it in. Why should I. Other’s feet, mine, beat
upon the parquet cement, over covered boulevards, rested around the one-fuse
posts, at times there were no stopping; no protection against intrusion, just
another man in the staircase about. With his shadow lose, made simple.
Freke Räihä (1978) is a poet, writing teacher, translator, critic, essayist, publisher and graphic designer. Also a parent and book hoarder and probably smokes too much.
hey
such whatsoever-so-much ricocheting from I the martyrized stranglulationist along with the mongrel dog-faced Father
caustically forced out of its immune insect. We gorge ourselves tossing and
turning men and tables Go Fuck You in Your Face Here in this restaurant I strap
on some culottes and spectacles to reinforce my portrayal of lousy exuberance.
We lost no step. We saw so well through the luminosity…The city is gutboil.
Laughter and tears release a tiny bit more crocodile smiling inside a coffee
cup it promises anyone coming across it a new form of teething or quite simply
put the repeal of the articles of law conceived by His Adroit Majesty Awaits us
patiently in the stables where our counterfeit money deploys itself against the
agrarians’ gold virtually a show-off And he? Speaking to… Taunting who? Squashing.
Soiling. Poisoning. Aggravating the other. I’ve killed him Gentlemen do you
realize what That so and so wanted to do? No more no less make a mockery of me.
So I took him by the throat. The work was done under-ground-elsewhere Not here
Under the insurmountable umbral collusion with a ritualistically purifying
jet-stream But I’m not forgetting I owe you my situation: What a nice little
runabout this was.
Take me,
Causticity. Crown my skull, Ink. I guzzle your quills. Circle the Madonna.
Pfft-scape! The glory of the Father the untraceable gibberish-spitting Father.
His speeches hammered to the point of my reign’s putrefaction. My move,
Cyclops! Everyone into the chamber. No, let’s meet inside the operating
theatre. Inside the other trance Oh what succulence! Take faith in my rifles
and patrolmen. Don’t dismiss them: Take warning get out of my sight The
harshness of termites attacking the exposed beams without even unscrewing my
view without a second thought of my immanence however jovial Jubilant pink upon
the never-ending whiteness Not even the rainy season! Not one seedling of corn!
Not one diplomatic accord! Not one foreign exchange! Not one holding their feet
to the fire! Men without a lyre you are forgiven! Enough suggestions Take my
gold my shadow my harems and get the hell out! I am become the king transformed
into a socialist. Now, enough!
* * *
The inked one does
not concern us here. Only compost. Sprawling outward with neither constraint
nor root. The type to die along the stairs of his publisher. Has neither woman
nor good sense in sight stomping into the ground and frequently sawing right
through. Yet another tongue trying his Atlas. Breaks slings and arrows yet
smiles and casts his shadow. The inked one is snuffed out. Those who never made
any headway outside his giant matchbox have been massacred. They’ve never
established order outside a script struck out from the start, outside any
communal sense save an associations of old scorpions But it was working its way
gently through his boxspring. A sort of worm had already ascended the parquet
flooring, climbed up the wall where the photo of his spitting-image was working
out his deserted obsolescence.
* * *
This is his text:
black
on grey alucite fungus moth the grammatical fist I won’t commune with My Father
didn’t do much else than augment you inside his halos and his grease Your
leopard latching on the double by the toe But I’ll endeavor to get out of my
own way It will release such sunlight that neither bomb nor telegraphy will
omit constraining the array I rattle my teeth out with. Over drinks he would
sometimes come to hazard harsh retorts and commit petty crimes. It quickly
became clear who’d maim who for a vodka! Without the least bit of shame. His
typewriter did the work while he was sleeping. A thousand ants settled up his
nodule. He hollowed out all of time in one single gesture. No longer daydreamed
of screaming sands or the few harvesters who’d settle down a stud after having
completely had it out—there were no clothes aside from a sack of hemp carefully
sewn together then burned in place by the ends of cigars. In those times
politics ran smoothly. Draping a caparison over all those who opened fire on a
standing guard or an emaciated dog. Politics reeked of its sperm. The Moroccan
Goumiers and Senegalese were scattered along the sidewalks, held their arms out
to the passers-by as if to signify that their death wasn’t the same as those!
But it was a trap, an indescribable lesson directed by the army whose duty it
was to surround the city by ever-broader means. The cesspools also reeked of
the passion of a god accused of high treason. There were winged sharks coming
out every ten minutes. These monsters would reward me with revolver or rifle
bullets whenever I wandered about in search of the paradise promised me on a
bench at school. After each lesson, the instructor would draw the sovereign’s
head out on the board. This was always his way of instructing us, but the only
thing he did was sustain a pitiful myth in our immemorial blood, which he
secretly knew, sooner or later, would be ejected. Near the school, a
conspirator had been shot. The noise of the gunfire seemed nothing short of
applause to me. Only later did I come to understand that it had been about the
liberation of an entire world and not of a single people rolled around in its
secular complexes, wrists tied, twisted, more and more strenuously bewildered,
and offering its backside to police batons, woven chicote whips, switches, and
other means of persuasion! There was no room left in this eye of mine which, as
if into a vat of sulfuric acid, had melted like a body without skeleton. Love
was unknown to me! But necessary to find a new skeleton for this costly
populace.
* * *
At
the end of the workday, I’d go home. I’d plop myself down in front of an old
typewriter that I called The Hurricane
and start typing. I composed my texts without thinking; I was of the
understanding that plans, notes, and other criteria necessary to the
development of a novel were of no use to me. I was writing my way through the
dark. Yet I have to say that the books first took form in my brain before being
thrown onto paper. I wrote with such speed that my own hand, having hold of the
pen, was incapable of keeping up with me. More often than not, I would spin out
an epic poem that would do it. One day, however, I must have struck a good
vein. I found myself totally bereft of productivity. I wouldn’t put my mind to
anything, much less myself. Perhaps that’s where the true creation begins. I
had left crybaby sentimentalism behind me along with reminiscences of all
sorts. Mallarmé had found himself in need of fording something all too similar.
And yet how he droned on! But throwing the dice rescued him. At that time, I
had already rejected all form, broken the normal metric, including that of vers
libre. I listened only to the jerky rhythm of things. A creaky door could
inspire me all the same as a man emerging from a particularly dangerous venture.
But I loved only the noise of TheHurricane. It seemed to me that each of
its flailings deformed the word over the course of its impression as if it were
the result of igneous fusion. I no longer had anything to say. I listened. But
the day came when I spit out a true vein of gold: I’d ejaculated a text
different than anything I had written up to then: a racket of machine-gun fire
followed by a rise of stifled howls. It was by way of this text I understood
that I would have to commit myself once and for all to the path of the
guerrilla linguistic! But I became completely closed off to others. I didn’t
even go into the office anymore. I had sent a three-month medical certificate
to my supervisor: an extraordinary sort of man. Go take a stroll through the
neighborhood, he’d tell me whenever I was feeling down and out. To tell the
truth, I must still be a sort of friend to him, but we can’t see each other
ever again. He had understood from very early on that my sole employment would
be to write without stopping, You should be fastened to a table with a
typewriter and paper. You’re an author! He knew perfectly well that my book
would be endless, that I would be consumed from the outset, Manure for desolate
consciences, there’s your book. No way you’re gonna leave the stable before the
manure reeks its way through. He took my blood for a vast, inexhaustible
stable, forever condemned to be filled for as long as I was willing to empty
it. I’d often tear myself apart. I loathed my origin, my parents, the world. I
would settle under the sun, in front of the window in my room, sometimes even
undressing myself, spreading out across the sill like a lizard lapping at the
sunlight. I had come to reject my relatives, my friends. The landlady would bring
them to my door to no avail.
* * *
The
Amazigh feel a kinship with madmen and genies. They suffer the world and its
twists and turns, but they admit any sort of life, any alteration, and they
adapt themselves to it with ease. They have the truth affixed to their
foreheads and they modify their lifestyles according to their taste, handing it
over to the printer and waiting around for its publication. They’re never
interpreted right, save the disgust some of them incite, so inevitably they
reject what comes back because it twists their ankles and takes them nowhere in
their ridiculous journey! But they never revel in defeat…
* * *
A
whole people is annihilated in the drool of a king who blubbers about and opens
fire, without drawing anyone else’s fire upon their brethren. The king shuts
down their internal work and progress but he uses both to his and his
benevolent defenders’ advantage. He doesn’t observe Ramadan yet he commands
others to do so. Along with those who spend their days losing their voice,
their strength and their power. They’re so afflicted by aphasia that they’re
propelled into ecstasy before the pestilence of his throat’s pouring out its
sporadic nonsense. He no longer exists for them because they’ve submitted
themselves to a bitter and grotesque fear. The fear of embers transcribed and
commented upon a thousand times by theologians who’ve long dismissed the Arab
tongue. Yes, if the Arabs haven’t illuminated their
prepared-or-plagiarized-but-nowhere-to-be-found-God in the vapors of an auriferous
world they’ve directed for so long; if they’ve come to believe the religion
they’ve been served like the remains of a bloody feast, no more than a literary
and metaphysical miscellany, yes, the Arabs will have pardoned God the
Non-Existent along with their anchorite-sword-of-a-beard! I was above all
taught fear, I was transfixed by it. Fear everywhere. In the home, in any
encounters; fear, disguised in the silhouette barreling down every angle of the
street: the intersection of the abyss! The whatever fear. I made this fear my
own after I became determined to dismember the god who’d dispersed it amongst
infantile brains. Now I’m an unbounded rage. I say to myself, Strike out if you
no longer have anything left to fear. That’s exactly what everyone who has
nothing to look forward to or back upon but the image of a police baton raised
against the world must do! I’ve put death in charge. Death who stumbles around
and souses itself in the eye of fear. I whipped it up, swallowed it, spat it
back out! It was no ordinary rot. It grew stagnant and remained fear in so far
as it could’ve consisted of something more appalling than it was. My vomit,
reddened by the torrid anguish and premeditated crimes of my digestion,
transcribed the fear through my eye which hurtled toward them like a fly to
shit.
FEAR ME, I AM YOUR FATHER!
FEAR GOD! In short,
FEAR!
That’s what made my life so difficult to grow accustomed to.
I’m never free of it. This fear is the tissue of my nights. It creeps up my
body and nestles into my cerebral membrane. It hammers its way into my skull
and disappears through my hair, only to immediately spring back before my eyes,
static, grotesque, and cruel.
THE
KING, THAT’S WHAT YOU CALL THE FEAR OF REMAINING THROUGH THE CENTURIES WITHOUT
BEING CONSCIOUS OF ONE ANOTHER, OF REJECTING THE NAMES OF SCALPED CHILDHOODS
FOR A CLOUD OF DUST.
Jake Syersak is the author
of Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow
Press, 2020) and Yield Architecture
(Burnside Review Press, 2018). Two of his full-length translations of Mohammed
Khaïr-Eddine’s work are forthcoming in the coming year: the poetry collection Proximal Morocco— and the hybrid novel Agadir, co-translated with Pierre Joris.
He edits Cloud Rodeo, an online
poetry journal, and co-edits the micro-press Radioactive Cloud.
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine was
born in 1941 in Tafraout, Morocco. Widely regarded as one of the most
influential avant-garde intellectuals and writers of the Maghreb region of
Northern Africa, he is especially renowned for his “guerrilla linguistic,” an
incendiary, Surrealist-inspired literary style which critically and
iconoclastically engages the cultural and political hegemony of postcolonial
Moroccan society. A vocal critic of King Hassan II, Khaïr-Eddine was forced
into exile in 1965 for his radical political views. Alongside Abdellatif Laâbi
and Mostafa Nissabouri, he helped found the avant-garde journal of
Francophone/Arab art and culture, Souffles-Anfas. He eventually returned to
Morocco in 1979 and died in Rabat, the capital, in 1995. A prolific writer, he
authored numerous novels, essays, and collections of poetry.
I, Caustic is one of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s earliest and most ambitious works. Part poetry, part ars poetica, part memoir, part fiction, part manifesto, and part political theatre, the book sees Khaïr-Eddine applying his trademark polyvocal Surrealism at full capacity. The narrator in I, Caustic is nothing less than the avant-garde itself, the linguistic guerrilla, relentlessly ambushing the various genres and voices at its disposal—donning the vocal cords of political sovereigns, the religious order, members of the bourgeois infrastructure, class conspirators, friends, family, and ancestors alike—demonstrating that the only authority is that of the tongue, the “king transformed into a socialist.”
The master has disappeared. You see it in how these pages darken, in how the burned ones recompose, in the appearance of the king. The master and the eunuch, who are the same, with his stela, his killjoy, his scorn, flaccidity, they collapsed at the perfect moment. The mares don’t graze anymore. They’re lying around, with their jaws open, their haunches entangled in the mane of the threadbare orange bed, fragments of the departures, of the openings, of the orgasms of the woman who was singing in the opening moment. The one who said something like it’s been a month since I’ve fucked anyone or she could also have said I’m demolished, I look like broken pieces in this constellation or when she sang this bed has seen it all or feed me when I’m hungry, etcetera, etcetera. Now, this woman has taken a name: the loose one. And it has a homolog, which is herself, which is other, which is all of them, which follow the tantrums, and the selves she takes to get it on with whoever she’s into, so that she can then get rid of them: the pearl
Now, let’s move onto something else
Fate
Up against your will
Through the thick and
then
He will wait until
You give yourself to
him
Echo & the Bunnymen. “The Killing Moon.”
With a bacteria lodged in her throat, without talking, without the power to speak, without power: defenseless. An infection has overtaken different muscles, creases, parts. This time it’s the throat. That’s how it is, how it will be. Like a tongue turned into globs of drool that enter and exit. Without concern for the body, its desires or its mess. Cryptic. Cryptic. Cryptic. Without power, without the power to speak, without the power to say what hurts the most, what she most desires or what pisses her off, what she already knows, what she imagined when no one wanted to stop her anymore. Inevitably, some come, others will come. There was a fuck, there will be millions. But it’s always the same itch. The same boredom, the same suffocation. And nobody knows the loose one.
Counting the days, the loose one strolls through the basic
territory, humming a song. She looks at her orange bed, thinks of the days when
sweat embroidered the sheets, and kisses, and purity and the piety. The same
and the same. Drool. Harass. Come.
Arrive. The bed. Filled with prayers. There are some keys under the pillow,
clasps for a necklace with a gold heart, which the loose one looks at
entranced, because she doesn’t have a heart. Beyond, in another space or under
another influence, the king is sleeping deeply. And he doesn’t listen. And he
doesn’t feel. And he doesn’t know that the loose one waits and waits for the
perfect moment, to make a scene, so as
to escape. As she has always done, because she can’t, because she doesn’t know
how to stay or because it simply annoys her, because she gets annoyed at
anything that starts to get serious.
As she’s making calculations,the loose one observes herself again and again. She enters and exits the bathroom, looks out at the street. She goes over to the balcony. She begins to water the plants on the terrace, which now burn from the cold of these last days of autumn. Soon winter will be here. And these, the burnt ones, remember that sunny day when the loose one told him: they are like our love; they’ve been born again. But it was a total buzz kill. And the eunuch knew it and shut up, his phallus shrunken as always. The loose one reconsidered, for example, when she would go by the window naked, or clothed, or horny. And this was just one example of the traps she set for him. With the eunuch nothing ever happened anyway. Nothing. Or better yet: nothing had happened, because he was a closed container, and stubborn, a little clumsy, a little stupid, limp fucks buried in memory, a stela, a condition one could return to.
The loose one is like this. She thinks the imperfections and disguises make her unique. I love this asymmetry she says one night while cutting her bangs in the bathroom. And she looked at herself over and over again in the mirror. Then, the trim became less precise when her eye would glance over at the orange bed. No one’s home tonight, the loose one would say, just me and the crisis. Then she started to laugh. And then came the stomach pain and the itch in her belly was instantaneous. That same night she went to the window thinking: what’s going on with my eunuch, what exchange of secretions is he involved in. Will he be picturing the ring worm he left in my belly, the loose one mumbles, her throat raw from so much talking, saying so much in vain. Because even though she doesn’t love him, the word weighs on her. And what does she do now in the solitude of the word, in the cruel speech of the days: the loose one waits and waits. And when someone appears, she attacks. Because that’s how the loose one is. When something is put between her thighs she doesn’t stop until it’s taken out and put back in again. The way she likes it or the way they like it. And afterwards nobody stops her. Once the loose one gets going, no one stops her.
And the pearl had thought that she would never again cry for him, for the master, for the eunuch. There’s no way to singularize it, the loose one says, wiping a teary eye, the wound has many forms, names and twisted, listless memories. The loose one haunts herself all day. Exactly all day long. And at night she gets worse. And the pearl acts like it’s nothing but she can’t take it anymore. Meanwhile the loose one takes great pains to please everyone, but it’s not enough. They always suffocate her. Straightening her corset, she repeats herself for them: I’m not that one, why can’t you understand?
It’s like this: the two of them get together and act like it’s nothing, but it’s something. The loose one breathes melancholically while she comes down with diarrhea; the pearl acts like it’s nothing, as if nothing is wrong with her. As if nothing were running through her, like that, just so, as self-confident as ever; then they look at each other and swap roles, swap conditions and souls. And inevitably one of them doesn’t care. Doesn’t care. She comes or finishes, coiling, and closes her eyes apathetically. Now, let something else come, the pearl says, with the ring worm boiling in her belly, her neck bent back, her eyes dried up from so much crying. And in that moment, in another temporality, the king moves, scratches his head, tries to wake up, but remains lethargic and beautiful, anesthetized, in the furor of a clear and silent night.
Suspiciously, hunger comes after sadness, the loose one thinks, as she fucks her way through the city. I’m so hungry. So. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. And she says it so many times that it’s becomes like a prayer, a command, a new way of begging. It’s at that moment when the king begins to slowly open his eyes. And gives her the look. Then the loose one murmurs: hopefully he’ll go down. And soon. It’s the only thing I’m missing. The only thing. And the pearl acts like it’s something, but she knows it’s impossible. Impossible to keep begging. Impossible to think that something is wrong. But the loose one tells her to wait, to keep very still and with all her senses wide open. With everything wide open.
Originally published by Editorial Cuarto Propio, Santiago, Chile, 2009, in 2010, La perla suelta (The Loose Pearl) won the Premio de la Critica (The Critics Prize) in Chile.
Paula Ilabaca Núñez (Santiago de Chile, 1979) is a writer, editor and teacher. She received the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize, the 2014 Juegos Florales Prize for her novel La regla de los nueve and the Premio de la Critica de Prensa Literaria en Chile (The Chilean Literary Critics Prize) in 2010 for La perla suelta, which these poems are excerpted from.
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan, finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human, National Book Award Winner, 2016. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award. He has translated books by other Chilean poets, including Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The art is a photo of Leif Holmstrand in performance.
My assassin’s body sits in the sun— pity be on the daffodil’s head—
like thick harlots riding a dragon— plummeting from the sky— dogs sniff them
and lick them by the pool— I leave them there and wade in— a sporadic abasement
that keeps me in good spirits— that is to say the lyric is also toxic— the pool
is named after the river it sits by— the Guataquia— river in all my dreams— I
dreamt my father swam the whole night and threw his body on the shore for all
to see— my father’s body was a prism that let others peer into the darkness—
let us see the many shades of color there— his body was blue all over on
account of death— body covered in soft teeth from the dogs— baby teeth from us
little white kids— the punctured lungs of my assassin— us little white kids pee
in the pool but no one notices— I stoop to drink and find blood in the drain— flakes of skin floating like
lily pads— on the shore are empty beer cans caught in the weeds like lice in
hair— us little white kids peel back the face of my assassin and stuff it with
spinach— stuff Popeye with spinach—
Popeye who is Escobar’s assassin— green like spring and well muscled— my
father’s body right after his execution— displayed in a morgue— displayed
across the nation on TVs— on Good Morning America— beamed into my living room
right before school— beamed into the homes of countless watchers— and entering
the room I watched, too—
A morning ripe with consequences flies circle fleas in the carpet images of the bridge collapsing over and over I beg the Animal Gods for sleep today but I have placed mirrors in its armpits I have changed everything I need to grieve for this peculiar loss the psychic horde of faces who will forget me one week after my last day at this job covered in light pink ash a smoky bulk a network of vague there is no sacrifice only feral and the sound of an arm or leg breaking that inner crack I am not ready to embrace the spiral a way of being here and not being here the secret club the code eye level with lions and their ways of goodbye
i haven’t prayed for
years yet as i am blowing you prayers
interrupt my
thoughts please watch over
& protect
X noon moon moan koan loan lean
mean meal
meat meet met wet
let lit it i
— i don’t remember
how this poem
is born i wear modesty like a kink
mariology
i wear
modesty like a kink
i find a list
on wikipedia maria of the moon
i repeat them
daily a cascade of every
maria
i have ever
been might be
not yet the
maria that has become known
maria of
small crises
moisture,
showers, clouds, cleverness
waves,
vapors, foaming, maria of a parallel world
i pause to
pray to the patron saint of the perfect lucite heel
for a pair of
margiela tabi boots to appear on ebay in my size
fuck maria of
fecundity i am cold, tranquil, serene, maria of the edge
i am
serpent’s nectar raw orange blossom honey bought
on the
florida georgia border unknown maria
of desire no longer recognized
weep hole
desire no longer
recognized i want to eat every daisy & dandelion
i see i want
to swallow the rain as if it were your come
or
drink the rain like piss if pee tasted
like memaw’s
sweet tea which i pretend it does
women’s bane, wolf’s bane, queen
of all poisons
so many ways
of saying flower power
i am
attempting telekinetic connections to clouds
but i just
end up in THE CLOUD adblock
all the art
bros of the anthropocene
that are
having emotional responses
to the end of
nature my body falls apart with the moon
but this isn’t a period
poem it’s a poem
period
or maybe it’s a weep hole
— i’m just a weep
hole helping lessen
the spiritstatic load on the masonry of whatever
Mai Ivfjäll is a bilingual poet based in Stockholm (by way of Atlanta) She is a member of the experimental Danish writing group Hekseskolen and author of the chapbook INTO LONGING VAST ROSE (If A Leaf Falls Press 2019).
Her poems have appeared in American Chordata, hotdog, Fanzine, Odiseo, Ordkonst, Pralin Magasin, Tidskriften Provins, Vakxikon’s Anthology of Young Swedish Writers, and elsewhere.
The photograph is from Swedish artist Leif Holmstrand’s series “Asami Kannon / Whore” (2017, performed at Uppsala Art Museum). Photo: Grzegorz Fitał.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 