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Elizabeth Grech
Minn bejn baħar u baħar. Ippubblikat minn Merlin Publishers.
kliem
Dal-kliem kollu jgħum ġo moħħi
se jkolli nogħdos għalih
kelma kelma,
nagħsru bħal ċarruta,
nonxru bil-labar tal-inxir,
nistennieh jinxef,
jitqarmeċ,
jitqadded
fix-xemx tikwi t’Awwissu,
imbagħad nifirxu
waħda waħda
fuq il-madum imtappan tal-bitħa,
inressaq widinti lejh
forsi nisma’ xi jrid jgħidli
qabel tiġi xxarrbu l-ewwel xita
u ċċallsu,
bħal karta maħsula
f’xi but.
novembru
Nixtieq inħares lejn ħsibijieti
bħalma nħares lejn l-oranġjo tal-weraq
jitħarrek fir-riħ ta’ Novembru.
Nixtieq inħares lejn ħsibijieti
bħalma nħares lejn is-sħab
qoton imdendel ġoċ-ċelesti.
Nixtieq inħares lejn ħsibijieti
bħalma nħares lejn rixa
titbandal bil-mod lejn l-art.
Sampurna Chattarji
Absent Muses
for Tamara Pellicier
My muses are made of flesh, real and distant as stars.
So often I cannot see them, and then,
such cold comfort in knowing they are there.
I need to work at keeping them real.
They slip too easily into the grey oblivion of things
we have wanted too much.
It is their absence I need. Into that absence I fold
the sparked nerve, the sprung wire, the small violence.
Into that absence, my song.
It is on absence that I feed. The missing body,
the vacant chair, the hole in the memory
where a word, or a face, should have been.
All conjecture, I nourish myself. Any scrap
of conversation will do. Accepting it like alms,
I carry it away for the time I will be able
to open my palms and read what is written there.
Most often the wind has wiped them clean, and so
I sit, looking at empty skin, the tautness that will wrinkle
into the empty leather-sac of sound. I sit,
waiting to be found. Another pair of hands will come,
lift me up, and on. For a while, flesh will mean
something more than a sketch of air. My mouth will taste
of other tongues, my lips will not need moistening.
I am readying myself for the desert.
My muses are flesh, real and distant as desert suns.
I have gazed at them too long. A sear
behind my eyelids, they bleach everything white.
White spots dance, a braille of intricate patterns,
imprinting everything, impenetrable
to everything but touch.
© Sampurna Chattarji
Yolanda Castaño
It is Pain / The Pain You Pretend to Feel
I look like I enjoy
the things I can’t abide.
Everyone talks
with their mouth shut.
This too.
The cave walls where someone tarnished
the bare stone 10,000 years ago.
Coins, electric current,
a girl born a beauty
pitted with complexes.
Like a Hedy Lamarr orgasm, Nikola Tesla’s eyes.
A country where you don’t
need to be,
just appear so.
The gloves peeled back, salt, the most prestigious
of all the schools for dubbing.
Capital is the nightmare
of getting stuck in our symbolic capacity.
The most fetching:
mortuary make-up.
Years of work all to be mounted on a granite horse.
The misery industry, wolfram in the vegetable patch.
Like a feverish body that knows
but feigns disinterest
Cheap tat false eyelashes,
a carbon copy of itself.
Confusing political poetry
with a selfie in the bathroom mirror.
Metonymy of evil,
the norm wrenched.
Staging, menu, the fire escape of speech.
Anything that will shoot aerial roots
and longs to return to earth having been in the light so long;
like sprouting potatoes.
The poem’s gaze is also like this,
lines of worker ants
crushed to be kept in place,
the shreds of gestures
that look like
something else.
