The Protectress | Păzitoarea

I don’t know when it started growing in the right side of my chest

lying on the bed, I feel its roar through my whole body
profoundly different from the dull sound of my left heart,

which, year after year, I had to touch
in silence,
almost in fear, to make sure
it was still beating.

I felt it first in the morning,
when the left heart moved imperceptibly
to the right

then the blood began to flow wildly,
digging new veins and arteries into the flesh.

I started bleeding at the lightest touch,
through my fingers, through the roots of my hair.
even if I ran my tongue over my teeth
or over my cracked lips,
the blood
would come spurting out.

then in the evening I heard the first bright beats of the right heart.
its roots reached from my ribcage to the claws of my hands.

that morning we wanted to reach the forest.
and because we could not reach the forest
we slammed shut the door, locked ourselves inside
and pretended to be wild animals.

it was dark
and from the garden a little song could be heard.

we only looked at each other, whimpering into each other’s mouths
and, invigorated,
we scurried to the rabbit burrows in the garden.
nobody knew us,
but we could hear the little song through the loosened
eyeholes of the hammock.

it was summer

and all the weeds were falling asleep
in the hammock.

you hadn’t had enough to eat and you were licking your lips

then I placed a black, warm rock
on the burdock leaf
and the little song stopped. we heard a clicking sound and
willow branches were falling noiselessly onto the lilies in the water

you were shivering
your hunger seemed to be fading and I looked at the heart.
no blood was flowing.
only large drops of rain.

now our house is turning to ice.

in the doorway we touch each other

like hands encountering a wounded animal in the dark.

your memories arrive slowly, stumbling
and slip freely through my skin

I move through the cold like an unbandaged burn victim

we stay inside

our brains shattered

outside, an enormous gate of flesh
through which we cannot pass

but it is the only way to catch up with ourselves
and we close the edges of this wound
in silence.

I watch unmoved as our hair grows
from shoulders to knees.

it is the way the two of us make love.

because the only light was the one
at the end of the cigarette,
I climbed slowly, step by step.

my bed is swinging three metres below
the moon

and here, finally,

I have everything inside me

the blood the right heart and the left
the air in the lungs enough for two
bodies
and the light, passing through new flesh to the back of the left breast
and from there it will emerge just once,
shattering my retina.

I have everything inside me
two ethereal human beings
only in an embrace
can they touch the ground.

but the edges of the wound stay raw
forever

my bed is swinging three metres below
the moon
and I wake suddenly looking at the sky.

I am
the protectress.

defending an almost spherical moon,

light obscuring light.

I talk to her a while we cry and we don’t know who puts whom
to sleep.

when we cry deeply a piece of the moon grows over
heart and sky,
black, falling into the void.

I am the protectress.
the blood invades my heart
howling
and cannot melt it.
bile and stomach surge into the mouth.
the liver is crushed between the teeth
like a cork in the neck of an old wine bottle.
I barely know when the lungs shriek briefly
and plunge into the earth, pulling both kidneys
after them.

with my broken diaphragm rolling around my mouth like a
piece of cloth
I flutter and flutter and
fluttering
I discard tiny bones
through my mouth.
four thigh bones are stuck
in my throat

and the translucent skin cracks

like a membrane stretched too far over this enormous heart
that forces my body
away from me.

~

nu ştiu când în partea dreaptă a pieptului a început să crească

întinsă pe pat, îi simt vuietul în tot corpul
mult diferit de zgomotul surd al inimii stângi,

pe care ani la rând a trebuit
să o ating în cea mai desăvârşită linişte,
aproape cu spaimă, pentru a mă asigura
că bate.

primele semne s-au arătat dimineaţă,
când inima stângă s-a deplasat abia simţit
spre dreapta

apoi sângele a început să curgă rătăcit,
săpând noi vene şi artere prin carne.

sângeram la cea mai mică atingere,
prin degete, prin rădăcina părului.
chiar şi atunci când îmi atingeam dinţii cu limba
sau o treceam peste buzele crăpate,
sângele ţâşnea
pulverizat.

apoi către seară am auzit limpede prima bătaie a inimii drepte.
rădăcinile ei încep în plex şi sfârşesc în gheare.

în dimineaţa aceea ne-am dorit mult să ajungem în pădure.
şi pentru că n-am ajuns în pădure
am trântit poarta, ne-am încuiat înăuntru
şi am început să facem ca animalele.

era întuneric
şi din grădină se auzea un cântecel.

doar ne-am privit, scâncind unul în gura celuilalt
şi odihniţi,
am luat-o la goană spre vizuinile iepurilor din grădină.
nu ne ştia nimeni,
dar noi auzeam cântecelul printre ochiurile
deşirate ale hamacului.

era vară

în el adormeau toate buruienile.

tu nu mâncaseşi destul şi te lingeai pe buze atunci

am aşezat pe frunza de brusture
o piatră neagră. era caldă
şi cântecelul a stat. se auzea un ţăcănit şi
crengile sălciilor căzând fără zgomot peste crini în apă

tremurai tot
parcă-ţi pierise foamea şi m-am uitat la inimă.
nu curgea sânge.
doar picături mari de ploaie.

acum casa noastră îngheaţă.

la intrare ne atingem

ca atunci când dai peste un animal rănit în întuneric.

amintirile tale vin încet, bâjbâind
şi-mi scapă prea uşor prin piele

înaintez prin frig ca un ars viu fără bandaje

înăuntru stăm

cu creierul spulberat

în faţa unei imense porţi de carne
prin care nu se poate trece oricum

dar numai aşa ne ajungem din urmă
şi apropiem în linişte
marginile acestei răni.

privesc netulburată cum ne creşte părul
de la umeri până la genunchi.

e felul în care noi facem dragoste.

pentru că singura lumină a fost cea de la
capătul ţigării,
am urcat încet, treaptă cu treaptă.

patul se leagănă la trei metri sub
lună

şi-abia aici

am totul în mine sângele

inima dreaptă şi inima stângă
aerul din plămâni cât pentru două
trupuri
şi lumina, trecută prin noi ţesuturi până în spatele sânului drept
de unde va ieşi o singură dată,
spulberându-mi retina.

am totul în mine
două făpturi uşoare
ce numai îmbrăţişate
ating pământul.

dar marginile rănii rămân mereu
proaspete

patul se leagănă la trei metri sub
lună
şi mă trezesc dintr-o dată privind cerul.

eu
sunt păzitoarea.

păzesc o lună aproape rotunjită,

o lumină întunecând altă lumină.

îi vorbesc puţin plângem şi nu mai ştim cine pe cine
adoarme.

când plângem mult îmi creşte o bucată
de lună în locul inimii şi cerul,
negru, se arunca-n gol.

eu sunt păzitoarea.
sângele năvăleşte în inimă
urlând
şi n-o poate topi.
pe gură se preling fierea şi stomacul.
ficatul se sfarmă printre dinţi
ca un dop în gura unei sticle de vin vechi.
aproape nu ştiu când ţipă scurt plămânii
şi se înfig în pământ, trăgând după ei
cei doi rinichi.

cu diafragma spartă, înfăşurată in jurul gurii ca o
cârpă
flutur şi flutur şi
fluturând
scot
pe gură oasele mici.
patru femururi îmi stau în
gât

şi pielea străvezie crapă

ca un înveliş prea întins peste inima asta de elefant
care dă trupul afară
din mine.

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

Love as an Atoll | Lubirea ca un Atol

last night I thought of you for the last time
you were conducting the sea with a brush
and the ocean turned green
and that inception the size of a grain of sand
was filling with nacre
love was born that way:
we navigated hundreds of night-years
on an anchorless ship through the eye of a storm
to the sound of dolphins whistling in pain

no
no more can I bear the burden of love
waves of distrust are striking like hammers
and flooding the shores
today I need an anchor or I’ll drown

~

azi-noapte m-am gândit pentru ultima dată la tine
dirijai marea cu pensula
și oceanul s-a făcut verde
și începutul acela cât un fir de nisip
se umplea de sidef
așa s-a născut dragostea:
am navigat sute de nopți-lumină
pe o corabie fără ancoră în ochiul furtunii
auzind deseori fluieratul de durere al delfinului

nu
nu mai pot îndura iubirea
neîncrederea lovește în rafale
inundă țărmul
azi am nevoie de o ancoră să nu mă înnec

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

2014-02-07 00:21 GMT+02:00

I was old but now I am fine

I speak the truth

the city is buried under snow I talk neither to myself nor to you

the future

as distant as possible consumes me deeply

I have children

so I don’t consider the opportunity offered by

a mental institution

in a moment of fear I found myself heartened

by your voice

some words

I’m not even sure if you ever uttered them or

if I’m just imagining it

I sit in my broken armchair and listen to the laughter coming from the kitchen

announcing the little saturnalia

then the physical exercise

we will receive credits and use them to pay the bills

and rates and buy healthy food our bellies will be full it will be warm

we will fill up the tank and drive around the apartment block always around

the apartment block

over-refined

over-adjusted

potentially immortal.

~

am fost bătrână dar acum sunt bine

spun adevărul

orașul e sub zăpadă nu mai vorbesc singură și nici cu tine

viitorul

cât mai îndepărtat mă preocupă intens

am copii

deci nu iau în calcul șansa pe care ți-o oferă un spital de boli

nervoase

într-un moment de frică m-am surprins încurajându-mă cu vocea

ta

niște vorbe

nici nu mai știu dacă le-ai spus vreodată sau doar

îmi imaginez că le-ai spus

stau în fotoliul meu rupt și ascult râsete din bucătărie

anunțând mica beție alimentară

urmează înviorarea

vom obține credite cu ele vom achita facturi

și rate și alimente sănătoase vom avea burta plină va fi cald

vom pune benzină și vom călători în jurul blocului mereu în jurul

blocului

ultrasofisticați

ultraadaptați

posibil nemuritori.

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

The Sweet Blade of Time | Lama Dulce a Timpului

something in me urges
me to contemplate
the whisper of night into day
like an avatar, the ink migrates from the Vitruvian Man
you watch me the way a child touches a new toy
you take shelter in me from the tornado of moments
that carves wrinkles and desiccates hearts

sometimes you thank me for reviving you
we expose our wounds when the tongues of the clock fork
spitting poisonous nectar
and you push even harder and you walk through me
in an apotheosis of time that has finally taught you
to love me

~

ceva din mine mă împinge să privesc 
cum noaptea geme ușor înspre zi 
cerneala se desprinde de omul vitruvian ca un avatar 
mă privești așa cum un copil atinge o jucărie nouă 
te ascunzi în mine de tornada secundelor
care sapă riduri și usucă inimi 

câteodată îmi mulțumești că te-am resuscitat 
ne dezgolim de răni când limbile ceasului se despică 
clipind a miere cu venin
iar tu intri și mai puternic și mă străbați 
într-o apoteoză a timpului care te-a învățat în sfârșit 
să mă iubești 

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

CHROMA

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged

Igloo | Iglu

The birds that invade the sky with phosphorescent wings,
they are moments of softness, cracks in plaster-time.
I see their splinters among the spent stars and I ask the planet of a thousand solitudes not to spread her tentacles towards their circle, rainbow caught in the ladder of clouds.

On the stave of death I arranged days of mourning, unchained nights…
the spotted horses of anxiety…
but still you come in and out of my chest, bird
of destiny curled inside a cactus.
My heart expands to the size of a solitude broken
by our existence, by our own creation.

Here, now, glassy life flies among the cobra-birds
biting their tails abandoned in the dusk.
The day will come when youth summons back the birds glued
to the sky and you will no longer be able to steal the flight
of winged souls,
o stainless air, o love that clouds my own igloo!

~

Păsările care invadează cerul cu aripi fosforescente,
ele sunt suave ale clipelor, fisuri într-un timp de ipsos.
Le văd atelele printre stele stinse şi rog planeta celor o mie de singurătăţi
să nu-şi întindă tentaculele spre cercul lor, curcubeu prins de scara norilor.

Am aşezat pe portativul morţii zile îndoliate, nopţi desferecate…
caii neliniştilor pagi…
dar tot îmi ieşi şi îmi intri în piept, pasăre
a destinului cuibărită pe un cactus.
Inima mi se dilată cât o singurătate spartă
de propria noastră zidire, fiinţa.

Acum şi aici zboară, viaţă sticloasă, printre păsări-cobre
ce îşi muşcă coada lăsată peste amurg.
Va veni ziua când tinereţea îşi va chema
păsările lipite pe cer cu adeziv şi nu vei mai putea fura
zborul sufletelor înaripate,
aer inoxidabil, dragoste care abureşti propriul meu iglu!

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

3 Romanian Poets in Translation: Ana Dragu, Angi Melania Cristea and Laura Cozma


Donna Quijote by Viorica Ciucanu


Cartea | The Book by Viorica Ciucanu



Sarutu | The Kiss by Viorica Ciucanu

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged , , , ,

Bicoloured | Bicolor

I can be quiet with the alabaster syllables
I can rattle the silence
or adorn the lines of destiny
with bicoloured storks

I love the endless column
its cedar scent
but the knife with which I sculpt the clouds
smells white as if cutting slices
from the snow of spotted horses

when will tiny gods
truly start to balance
upon the tragedy of being an angel
for a minute as long as an eel?

I retreat among waves
and scatter storms across the humble sea
where people hear no complaints
only the slow pedalling of lives

~

pot să tac cu silabele de alabastru
pot să zornăi liniștea
sau să împodobesc liniile destinului
cu berze bicolore

iubesc coloana infinitului aroma
ei de cedru
dar cuțitul cu care sculptez norii
miroase alb de parcă aș tăia felii
din zăpada cailor pagi

când vor începe cu adevărat
să se balanseze dumnezei minusculi
peste catastrofa de a fi înger
un minut lung cât un țipar?

mă retrag între valuri
și întind furtuni peste marea simplă
unde oamenii nu pot auzi proteste
doar vieți pedalând

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

Poem with Sea | Poem cu Mare

the sea is spilling young fish onto the shore
your smile is hanging in the horizon like a hairpin
where are the ice banks the hordes of lovers
the seagulls on one leg
when the ship capsizes?

your hands are scattering salt
majestic time is flowing from the green eye of the sea
I am the sand dune
against whom the sea grows restless
star with a coral mane I am
ladder against the firmament of the sky nomadic green lizard

~

marea revarsă pe ţărm peştii tineri
zâmbetul tău se agaţă ca o clamă de orizont
unde sunt banchizele coloniile de îndrăgostiţi
pescăruşii într-un picior
atunci când vaporul se îneacă?

mâinile tale risipesc sare
din ochiul verde al mării curge timpul regal
sunt duna de nisip
din care creşte agitaţia mării
stea cu coamă de aramă sunt
scară pe firmamentul cerului şopârlă verde călătoare

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

The Ruse of the Night | Trucurile Nopţii

tonight sparkling quinces are moaning on the windowsill
through the skin of each star I see perennial shadows
time to harvest the wine grapes
that terrible gift of drinking must from the palms of life
as if I were or were no longer a poet
in a world of pets and ambrosia
in the funicular of death

the evening bell grazes the cathedrals
unafraid of disturbing thistles
the city centre alight with love bears fruit in genuine
trees
heavy buds burst under the feet of the living
chanting an ave maria with their secular body
in exaltation

the grapes of autumn burst against
the great chinese wall
surrounding the aura of the cantaloupe city
its millenary thirst for young poets
the old flagstones fronting deadened statues

death’s bacchic breath strikes the imaginary gates
of my body giving birth among the chestnuts
to hours of gentle words at solstice

~

noaptea asta gem pe pervaz gutuile spumoase
prin carnaţia fiecarei stele zăresc umbrele perpetue
ora de cules viile
harul acela teribil de a bea must din palmele vieţii
ca şi cum ai fi sau nu ai mai fi poet
peste o lume de pet-uri şi de ambrozie
în funicularul morţii

clopotul înserării paşte printre catedrale şi
nu se sfieşte să răscolească ciulini
centrul luminat de dragoste rodeşte în pomi
adevăraţi
mugurii plini pocnesc sub paşii celor vii
care rostesc cu trupul lor laic un ave maria
pe voci înalte

strugurii toamnelor plesnesc stropind
marele zid chinezesc
ce înconjoară aura oraşului-cantalup
setea lui milenară de tineri poeţi
vechile pavele din faţa statuilor amorţite

suflul bahic al morţii izbeşte porţile imaginare
ale trupului meu ce naşte printre castane
ore de alintat vorbele la solstiţiu

Posted in ROMANIAN | Tagged

A Discussion on Verity Spott with 6 Poems

I suppose what we’ve been trying to do so far is establish a language space that deliberately alienates anyone and anything that enforces the gender binary. Pretty simple. Really easy actually; pinpoint every harmonic lie on the map and structurally dismember them.
Verity Spott, Trans* Manifestos

During the course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Verity Spott: From a Reverie
Verity Spott: Sonnet
Verity Spott: ‘So in your silent still small throat …’
Verity Spott: Sonnet
Verity Spott: Sonnet
Verity Spott: Sonnet

The longest poem printed here, ‘From a Reverie’, starts almost like an incantation with these swung lines: ‘In single minute gulps like propranolol the night sways, steadies / to a short halt. And the neck stops. Stops wide open to the space it now / appears to be in …’ So much has already happened here. The softness of the lines, the suggestion of being ‘wide open’ to something, invites us to gently sink into the narrative of the poem as it begins. But this effect is deceptive. Almost imperceptibly, the material neck, the actual body, which stops and is wide open, conjures the image of a corpse.

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva writes that

the corpse… is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons us and ends up engulfing us.

The daydream, the ‘reverie’, has a structural position analogous to the abject in the figure of the corpse. The daydream drags into waking life that which the subject ordinarily consigns to night, to the cinema of sleep, in order to constitute itself, to function. This negative relation does not hold true for the abject. Rather its consciousness (or the consciousness of it) integrates the threat to the subject into its expression, is almost made of such threat, such pain. It is in part then the abject that speaks through the pronoun ‘it’, which in this poem can suddenly ‘explain how on earth it might actually / feel at least some of the time now in its sleep or when she or they are / awake but mostly then its kept in silence’.

It too is open in its consciousness. It thinks its experience in different hostile environments which mostly keep it from expression – the wedding, sex, work, memory – and is thereby dragged through an opening into a memory in which it tries to articulate itself and its thoughts on monogamy, but the body that listens to it ‘doesn’t allow himself / the pains, they well up in his body.’ In this writing, things coexist. We can no more separate the present from the past than the body from its environments, its (subject’s) tortures and agonies. It is not that there is an equivocation or erasure of antagonistic forces, such that experience and world become matte and featureless, but rather that everything is revealed to be intricately riven with strata, including the stratum of total contradiction. For every thing, even the most objectionable and abject, contains the possibility of being otherwise; every fact is a promise of its revocation.

This fundamental antagonism does strange things to the language of poetry and its means. One of the crispest, most striking images in ‘From a Reverie’ comes when ‘it’ grabs a shower nozzle, with a disc with ‘holes / in like the holes in the back of a birthing toad’, behind which ‘a perfectly formed / ready salted Pringle’ is concealed. This image of the Suriname toad – the young of which hatch fully formed from eggs which have become implanted in the skin on the back of the mother – seems to upend the traditional relationship of image and comparison. It is not the toad’s perforated back which is perceived as reminiscent here of a shower head, but the other way around – as if any everyday object could always be equated to the most obscure and bizarre referent. No object and image at two ends of a hierarchy, but the weird place where both of these things cohabit, and where we too can live, in the poem. ‘It feels disgusting’, but the disgust in the poem bears no value judgement. Actually this image of the toad and the shower nozzle and the Pringle is a moment of tenderness and respite. The toad-pringle like a precious diamond. A place where ‘it’ can speak back to its pain.

This site seems to correspond to a position that Spott takes in relation to the classic trans* narrative of transition, resisting any clean progression from here to there. In Trans* Manifestos, Spott problematises the narratives imposed upon the trans* community, the escape ‘toward the great white sun’. Spott proposes instead ‘staying still there’, ‘occupying the space of social discomfort for THEM and not US’. Here the trans* subject is not in a state of ‘transition’ which corresponds to a cis-normative understanding of binary gender, but of resistant occupation. From that space, Spott pokes language through ‘its’ pores, releasing all its minute toads. The way the pronouns switch and move like those optical grid illusions where the dots between the squares disappear when you try to focus on them directly. In our translation, the German language can be observed squirming as it tries to resist its gendered structure. We can make es act as a pronoun (though it always sounds a little Freudian), distinguish itself from ich or er, but when it/es becomes possessive, it goes back to being his (sein). And even the inanimate objects are constantly throwing their genders in your face …

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Sonnet

Now skim the shock of sky that split without
us, sinking through the plaiting of the reids:
You slept, and whispered all your silence out,
the shoreline sang out threats in choking heaves.
The houses, polder fizzing in the ear.
What’s that? It snaps your cheek; a little rain?
Behind a shock of teaming buddleia
the face that switched my heart back on again.
The choice, to wince or lean into the gale
disclosing faces traumatised by rote
our unclaimed lives that rocked and broke in trails
the subtlest loss at edge of eye, remote:
To build an oath or crush this tiny snare
make rendezvous in all our hearts, laid bare.

Posted in SPOTT | Tagged

Sonnet

She creaked beneath the weight that taught His skin;
His tense electric ghost to be put out
amongst the ropes and ladders of His doubt;
He’d shake to let his body climb back in.
They pushed her organs into disbelief
that nouns should grind and populate her life.
And with the dream of sanity’s respite
pronounced the lockup – rendered her to grief.
Reanimated all His emptied flesh
to crush away her testifying voice
and break from life confessions of His choice.
gave all His rigid promises afresh:
The icon’s truth of He and her made love,
intolerance, its pronouns from above …

Posted in SPOTT | Tagged

Sonnet

for Dolly

Coming home to all of most alarm, there
across the shaving edge, & back stuck in,
be shored &
built back, snared
to granted joy or tensile pins.
If you are there,
oh there again is us,
colliding harms unite till bodies sing,
closely taut and still. Just as their stationary mind
comes back so left among unfelt alight.
Filled my voice to courage –
newly hammered fractal
pheadsfgia to surface,
to running up the front
hungrily. Just play this intricate drumming
the cat-wound flat of the string
banging on the paws …

Posted in SPOTT | Tagged

‘So in your silent still small throat …’

[1]So in your silent still small throat my broken voice may sing. I’d say a mile off the shore is the wind farm. One hundred and sixty eight windmills. I wonder what their sound will be. As they were being hammered into the seabed the pile drivers sent their echoes to the surface of the water. I stood there by the pebbles at the edge of the water on a very cold and still night. The sound was barely audible yet so completely full. It seemed that the sound was coming up from the smooth flat surface of the water – that the smooth flat water was somehow projecting the sound into the still night air. I fell forward in my bed with a gasp and my eyes shot open. By the edge of the tidal flow I watched. We watched as the water found its passages towards the sea. We watched it come back. We were stranded and we were also drowning and we were also breathing and we were also silent. We were also speaking. We were speaking as the water was projecting itself into sound, into the air, into space, into our minds. We were also no longer alive and we were also completely full of life. In fact you and I, we told ourselves, were the life and soul of the party. And so we stepped from room to room, our vast economies, our limitless data. Conversations. Stepping back and forth against the tide. A colossal warning on the beach. People must not come onto the beach from the sea whilst they are alive, unless sanctioned they must first be dead people. We do not speak ill of the dead, or of newborns. It is everyone in the middle we detest. The young know nothing. The middle aged are themselves. The old are stupid and angry. The dead are perfect. We do not speak ill of a tide once receded. The stones and jetsam it leaves behind it. They are its clothes. The discarded. Speaking like “a dotard”. Fire and fury. The sound that rose from the water was so terrifying. You told me that it was the piledriver. Similarly when the tide has totally receded the wreck of the SS Vina comes into view. Its mast pokes through the waves at a high tide. It was left at the outflow, primed to explode, you told me.

The Fleet arrived at Invergordon on Friday, the 13th, and shore leave was given that night. There was some disturbance in the Canteen and several men addressed the other men present on the subject of the reductions in Naval Pay. On Monday, the 14th, the WARSPITE and the MALAYA proceeded to sea to carry out Exercises. On Monday night further meetings and disturbances took place in the Canteen and the men present agreed that the Fleet should not be allowed to go to sea the next day. On Tuesday morning [in some ships] the men fell in when ordered and carried out the normal work of the day and prepared for sea, but in other ships the men refused to fall in.1 Fall in too be as a lost face my tiny voice to sing. Still, small, gut there’ll uh. Assailed laughter slipped across the salt. “We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all.” [3]. Arrested on 9 January 1954, in March of that year Pitt-Rivers was brought before the British courts charged with “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons” or “buggery”. It was the first time this charge had been used in a British court since the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and it led to public criticism that the police were pursuing a McCarthy-like purge of Society homosexuals. [2] The father of participant Jeff Tefft felt he needed to post a letter in a local newspaper disavowing his son. Pearce Tefft says that although he and his family are not racists, once his son’s face and name were posted on social media they became the targets of people upset with his son.3 The distance is non-metrical. The movements beneath your feet. The inclination of the voice to turn back, to give in. The speculation of credibility. The meanings in the bitten tail. The hazardous examples. The set in stone, in stomach. The fact of victim. The fact of aggressor. The proximity of love. The traction of disrepair. The normality of sustain.

The pang of forced closure. The pressure to be. The iconic nature of being alive. The games, e.g. Golf. The analysis of the subject. The descriptions of illness. The testimonial. The cement of disdain. The barrel, the captain, the boson, the peninsula. Being afraid. Being tested. The elegance of the shrapnel. The hyper intelligence of quantified freedoms. Speaking. The endless glib section of the auditorium or of the galley or of the lips smacking together in. Or of the eyelids smacking back and forth, closing with a colossal loudness in the dark. The intrepid pioneer for example. The Royal Air Force used it for target practice leading up to the invasion of Normandy, and in 1944 a gale carried the SS Vina to a sandbar where the hole-covered boat took on water and stayed. [4] The company’s staying power, to give but one example. We gathered at the top of the field and walked. We were unquestioning of our complexion. The skin, for example. What it has given us. Speaking of that us. How uncomfortable you are now. What pain! The plaiting water snaking out through the marsh and the birds that narrowly asses the ground for their landings. The twist of a kind in the stomach. The change in public opinion from pre-op to post-op, to the dead, to in gradients at a fast incline a living face. The violence always in inaction. The wreck loaded with explosives. Things like that.

1† Extracts from a letter to Sir Clive Wigram, Private Secretary to the King from Sir George Chetwode, the Naval Secretary, 16th September 1931 (ADM 178/129)
2† NON
3† NPR
4† NON

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From a Reverie

In single minute gulps like propranolol the night sways, steadies
to a short halt. And the neck stops. Stops wide open to the space it now
appears to be in: Belgium, on the north coast where it now seems that
it has been having a dream in which it is in Belgium with Camille

having an occasional polite hug. Not really knowing you just
who you are and what a part of you represents. It speaks to Camille,
but Camille speaks back in French and though when it is awake it can’t speak
French, nor can it in this dream, the French it hears is perfectly spoken.

It goes to Koksijde with her. They wander around staring at the knives
with bone handles in one of the windows. Suddenly it can explain
something it has come to understand: How on earth it might actually
feel at least some of the time now in its sleep or when she or they are

awake but mostly then it’s kept in silence, that thought interrupted
by the angry parent on the seat at the back of the bus. It goes
like this, for example: The heaping anxieties of, say, being
taken to a wedding to be shown off as some kind of sinking face,

an unspoken motion amongst all the other celebrants who sign
to one another and themselves, to be true or to be failing
“Hold. My. Hand.” pulling their willing or unwilling or half reluctant
faces into one another’s fields of vision where marriage flickers,

how the only satisfaction that it gets here is relief at not
invoking all that screaming which it comes here to feel guilty, when it
hits its digit at the dimming window to the next unliving waste
of food and gestures to the lighting of a world it doesn’t know. Help.

W hat it is, how much of a peculiar straight line turned deeply up
as it is into every line of consequential fire, families
become more deeply ingrained or lost. Or else it feels somehow going
back to its old job with its old rotas where the annual leave forecasts

the rest aside from sick days so long as what’s disclosed is now never
to be made again to choose. It wants (it is trying to tell you this)
to have silence and solitude, its own distracted time so it can
sort its own shit out in its own kind of broken distracted way. Or

not solitude but in fact the ones it often doesn’t get to see
who somehow don’t fit the usual configurations of names and souls;
who are beautiful yet also they are always. It wants again that
shield against another one’s mouth where it knows it might help. Need it. But

now it gets torn from the knife window down into a locker room filled
with towels and showers where it has to use them, the towels, in full
knowledge they belong to those that use the locker room and It cannot
withdraw money and owes Camille at least €60 for transport

into Koksijde alongside any incurred translation fee it is
dreading all that might come from the day ahead. Dreading getting it off.
Dreading when next it might swallow it or sharply inhale as if to
gasp, only to push again at what it knows won’t happen: Not heaven.

T he same songs in the same eyes blinking over in the same glissando.
It is those same faces make it still alive. Not allowing it dare
drop out. In what is called its real life it knows full well there are things
to be dealt with – things that never have. At that moment in general, teeth

and just later called “now”, its teeth. Saying things back to its life then
again into silence. Going to the hardest lengths to keep its things
so easy. Doing the hardest easiest to get jobs as opposed
to the easiest hard to get ones with air conditioning and breaks

and socials; training and tea and career development. It is
the mistress at deploying its scar tissue in place of its fate.
It chooses one of the wrong towels: A blue one – already wet. It sees
someone it thinks it remembers coming from a cubicle where it

finds a boy wet from the shower, about seven years old. The boy
is joking about horses. The jokes are crass and the adult from the
cubicle is cut, infuriated by their sense of Belgian pride:
Belgium, where horses will not be mocked. Another petrified gulp, the

other side. It looks on as the boy is hated for his infringement,
as he is set up on a bin, his leg spavined raw left arms askew
as if in the open palmed prerequisite stance of a new Christian.
But what he is there isn’t like anything except what he is. He is a boy;

made into a tower on a bin. An improvised example of a punishment
in the evacuated wet room. Camille tugs on its arm;
that it’s time to go. We think about leaving. The lights go off.
The administrator leaves the room. She comes back. The boy has slackened

his position and so she reinforces it. She commands him back
onto the tower. His leg out. His palms. It feels as though there ought to be
a hood like it had seen in the famous photo of this ritual.
It thinks when it is awake that really it is still on the other side

thinking that monogamy is like a really disgusting cult whereby
people are not just allowed to be jealous of other people who are doing them
no harm, but where everyone is allowed to enact more harm, to
persuade themselves their jealousy is well founded. That’s what cheating is.

T he boy listens to it having this thought but doesn’t allow himself
the pains, they well up in his body. It doesn’t know everything.
There are some solid facts. The traumatic ones have been so painted they
almost go. The easy ones feel as beautiful as fiction: It has

a memory of it being called I: I at the bottom of Kilburn
hill. Probably in 1991 when Pringles went international.
We were at the bottom of the hill and a man called Toby Pring
offered everyone Pringles. He was only eight. It had one. It goes

to the shower nozzle and unclips it. Under the disc with the holes
in like the holes in the back of a birthing toad there is a perfectly formed
ready salted Pringle; and the same for each nozzle. It feels disgusting.
Now speak slowly back to its pain. Here it goes. Speak slowly, back to it.

*

Regained to make its service all but ready for his impact as the
tower he is made from lossless like its fortitude hurts, very damp.
Damp. Opening locking damp. Removing locking damp. And then I woke.
It woke up and it was me. I walked into the day with a pleasant

gait. Walked through the park and the trees. I could still feel Camille’s left eye
on me. A musty smell and the brilliant sunlight told the approach,
and on through the sink estate, past the buddleias and the bee hawk
moths dancing in the faces of the flowers. As I passed the wall by

your flat I caught something from the corner of my left eye (-
1.8). It was an earlobe cleanly severed sitting on the blank
wall. The bricks flattened out. It shudders. Each day it shovelled itself back
up that winding path on the slope unaware of its trauma to live

in its penance. Giving back its pain as its own penance to itself.
It has an allergy. So it pushes its eye against the nozzle.
It’s sad inside the socket under the filter. Outside the tower
is tortured. She’s still coming back to him, screaming about horses and

about national pride and decorum. She’s snarling in radiant
righteousness meanwhile it is dead. Meanwhile
I am dying in my sleep, seancing her, him and it with that one
stunning memory – the crisp – the happiness afforded at the base

of Kilburn wilfully tethered to another memory I don’t
have – a dog dragging my tired body up another hill. Constant
expressions of parental kindness. Forcing that clearing human
weight in gallant unmarked penance from one leg to next evacuate.

C lean basins, mirrors, toilets, surfaces, call to correct, as it stacks
up its meanings go remorselessly into this sluicing cabin. No
break out for a moment stolen perhaps don’t beds, desks, and solutions
in this clotted category its neck juts out at the tortured

tower of boy. Incendiary. It finds a token shell of love.
Departures from the town of its birth, of its sadness coupling buckle
by the writhing tormented elements above and below the bridge.

Posted in SPOTT | Tagged

Sonnet

My young domestic lifeline came to sit
exhausted, by the ashes of its lot
for what these boys so bravely now commit
when life itself is grounded in their rot?
If I would be the guillotine, its rungs
the head of Richard Spencer cold, shoved in
the microwave as testament to none,
his resolute interior, the pin:
To stretch the dried up soul into its frame
wafting paradichlorobenzene
his molded face and maggot mouth regained
let out in one last slip to feel obscene.
All gains in this lush meadow held my head:
Will summer’s fragrance block their throats instead?

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An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by Donald J. Trump

There’s this poem I read. I love poems. Really
love them. I should put out a book of my own
poems. It’d be very good. A very big seller.
So this poem’s about some air force pilot. Irish.
Says he knows he’ll be shot down somewhere
in the clouds then bitches about how he doesn’t
hate his enemies. Not too crazy about his own
team either. Only cares about the poor people
from his god-forsaken town. The poor people.
Give me a break. Let me just say, some of my
best friends are Irish. Very best friends. Very
close. They love me over there. This jerk-off goes
on about ‘some lonely impulse of delight’ making
him be a pilot. Sad. Very sad. Pathetic. Any one
of twenty top models I could have arranged for him.
In a minute. Soon sort out his impulses. The pilot
guy’s got a thing about balance. He’s got to balance
everything. And then, get this, he says it’s all ‘a waste
of breath’. Waste of breath. I could have told him that
before he got started. There’s a place for these losers.
It’s called Mars. There is no way this man would ever
be allowed into our armed forces. No way. I would
personally make sure of it. We got the best men
in the world right here. They can’t do enough for me.
Tremendously loyal.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Purple House − Maleny

It is a purple house in the shape of a shell
or an ear, which is impossible, except this
is someone able to hear the brain’s music.
Her mountain home crouches where it can listen
to the valley: undercurrents of sadness, noble lies,
a hand finding a hand while asleep.
Three young women pass me on the steep path
and laugh, but not unkindly; they detect
the hardscrabble hope of her visitors.
She places my freesias on a 1920s piano,
key lid hinged by brass, that reminds her of Vienna,
of coffee and songs after medical lectures.
It needs tuning, a project for next winter she says,
when the birds will know this is not a competition.
There is no laughing Buddha here, no incense or bell,
but walking fern, bloodwood and scrub cherry,
and behind her house a mountainside
that is careless drunk with eucalypt musk.
We stand on the cliff and I know nothing can spoil this:
an osprey that has found a late thermal,
a red kite that strains on its string, the lost notes
of Mozart’s last mass in a trumpet flower.
Every dominion of the sun cooperates, moves closer.
It is all the best that I have seen in my life so far
and all that I will never see, which is the same thing.
This insight is first bitter, then sweet to the tongue.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Vodokhryshchi

we take the steps down to the river and Seva talks to the dog
we woke up, barking us away from her pups, he stills her
in his language, their language, we pass this gatekeeper and cross
the narrow balance beam that leads to the little square pier,
the water is black glass but not frozen thick enough to cut a cross
in it, there is light from someone’s phone, the oldest man puts his towel down
before the ladder, begins to chant, someone checks another phone for the words
then joins in, the man’s son takes off all his clothes
and lowers his body, breathes sharply, seriously, crosses himself,
throws his head down into the black, comes up again,
water crawling from his hair, he looks like he’s crying,
another violent cross then he dives again, resurfaces,
lips pursed to spit out the cold, eyes staring forward
but focused somewhere inside himself, one more cross then under again,
up and back onto the platform and already Seva is stripping off
and taking his place, I watch him and rehearse his movements,
start taking my shoes off, pile my clothes carefully, towel in reach,
he gets out and I take my turn, drop my body into the dark

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Untitled

as if their passion is a shroud against the sun they
gather en-masse for the communion, feasting on
the body and the blood of the other, those who are
denied entry, who know the meaning of fire.

the fields of the parish are aflame, the sky is dark
with thunder, in despair they smoulder in the pews
eating bibles to survive, burning coins into their eyes
refusing to open the door for the new.

we stand in fields of soot watching as churches
burst ablaze, kindling our sacred fires with a discretion
of faith, we are nibbling on the biddings of others,
guiding our offspring across thorns.

from the darkness of night the sky is lightning
the focus is on the present day, and tomorrow
the churches are still burning and some of us
are trapped inside.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Another Gospel of Fire

When there’s nothing left to burn,
you have to set yourself on fire

—Stars, Your Ex Lover Is Dead



The one thing you’ll regret is not
setting the world on fire yourself.
Here we are, young and attractive,
poetic, even, with steam curling
from the tips of our fingers, searing
scorch marks on asphalt roads, fire
smoldering at the tips of our tongues.
If we wanted to
we could speak flame,
set whichever body ablaze with our lips,
raze this city down with our touch,
melt another skyscraper in the CBD,
another gas station, another plastic factory.
The bones of this city are kindling
we need only breathe
unto it.
Piles of dead bodies, the gas tanks of cars,
oil sheens slick on water trickling through
gutters, money wads in casinos. This swamp
of concrete begs for a spark. Everything
is tinder. Watch: this house
of matches ignites when I
speak.
You do not.
30 years from now, your skin
mummified against your bones,
nothing but the buttresses
of your vertebrae remaining
as your throat, your last phalanx
desiccating at the end of your wrist,
you will sit against
what was once a tower of glass,
when all the forests are cities
and all the oceans are cities
and all the cities are desert and ash.
You will try to speak then
but the wind will grind into your bones
and your wrist bones will shatter
into rubble beneath your tailbone.
It won’t even rain. No vultures.
No mushrooms blooming in soft earth.
There will only be melted glass and twisted
steel,
sun,
stone.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

imbibed aubade

stepping out with all the serenity of
an electric-ended possum pelt,
standing in the shock of sun
coat coursing with energy, eyes
turned to the pale face of morning.
I look the day’s debut up and down
slide my snout along light beams to see
if they have anything in them
worth eating.
the corners are crisp and the sidewalks
semaphore, filled with fibre optic cable,
coy lines of code spilling skywards
and I am making fists out of street signs,
and water out of wine, if the moon
was my lover I would never be alone
I would just think I was.
in Otsuchi, there is a phone booth
where you can dial the dead.
kaze no denwa, the wind phone
carries your words on the currents
but air is not the same thing as breath.
on the corner of Stranger Street
I hurry into the booth, furtive
though there is no one else in need
of a pay phone at this hour – or maybe
ever, in Brunswick. I wonder
what stories the few people passing
might make of my hushed breathing
into the receiver, or whether they care
at all. mumbling into the ether,
under the rumble of morning’s
rubbish run, I tell you the story
of the tawny frogmouth owl
that followed me home.
when of course you don’t reply
I put the receiver down
and run.

Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged

Small witch, a shield

young girl pretends she is witch she is healer
stalks round the yard out the front of her house
silver ghost gum combs itself through the air
small earth witch conjures spells in the dirt
summons grimoires from deep in the earth

libraries: everywhere you touch
all ideas come from the hearts of trees

muddy green rituals of root and leaf
unearthing old ways under the houso estate
whose concrete scabbed over lands fresh-bled
squatted-stolen-fenced into lego-land allotments
she peels back the sprawl of the colonising spread

a library, in everything you touch

with small hands gloved by ancient soil
she pries open portals to parallel worlds
where gods swim inside the clay
and frogs hold the balance in their throats
and mum’s not sick from the wounds of centuries

in bed she reads stories on the pulped hearts of trees
cooks up enchantments in the cauldron of her mind
to dream the right spell to turn herself into a shield
against those fists her mum’s always catching

you are the scar of your mother’s old wounds

midnight, a haunted house:
she slips from bed,
sneaks from room,
creeps down hall
and rests at door,
checks mum’s still breathing

o

she picks her way up the tree quick like a spider
lays heart down on bough as she catches her breath
hovers in light trance as leaves flick the sun
cheek to bark she meditates, practising death

like a jarjum asleep in a coolamon cradle
the world is a song being sung to you

metronome precision of the highway next door
ghosts ride up and down over ancient trade routes
where news and ideas and technology once travelled
in the stories and dances and songs of her old people
and in their hands, on carved message sticks

don’t grow up to rule the world, little sis
or even other people
just you stay sovereign over yourself
Posted in 96: NO THEME IX | Tagged