These poems are part of a series of 50 poems written throughout the pandemic of 2020-2021. Typographically, the choice of prose chunks is apparent. The gift of air, the generosity of verse, appeared to no longer resonate as it may have done, tired out in confinement, struggling to breathe. Prose does not, however, discard the verse so much as it chooses to embed it, to hide it, to let it peek through a veil. If verse exposes connection in, through, and by separation, we can consider the same mechanism at work here, in punctuation, sentence length, and the arrangement in paragraphs. The redoubled fragmentation (numbered poems, lettered paragraphs) is expanded by the variations in pace and density, emphasizing the openness of the fragments and their interrelations. The two paragraphs of each poem are like sides of a cassette tape, fleeting, rewound with a pen and altered in their magnetism by each playback. In this staged aurality, voice and noise are contiguous, filling the silence in between - or creating it.
The poems were originally written in English. Their translation, here, does not seek to retain lexical precision so much as it functions as yet another iteration in variation.
1.
A.
Hallucinating beginnings. Stone islands mentioned in passing. Hastily baked cornbread. Unsynchronized sleep hours. Quick decisions of omittance. Not wanting to hang up. Excessive lyricism. February nightfall. Grass-weave blinds fixed with a quick nail. Dill martinis against freezing. Interruptions brought by renaissance scholars. Sharing half your transcendentals. Amongst dark wood, the light still lives and I have grown much older.
B.
Puzzled by the first two letters. An opening, we’ll say, a better word for breach. Dear members of the board. A bottle in a message. A celebrating tree. Red and blue dots at the edges of sailboats. Little girls looking puzzled. Metadata-rhetoricians fighting against fever. Bits of laughter on the couch. Dreams, made for waking up.
2.
A.
Late summer rain. Dryer lint on the floor. Moonlight specks in midst of concrete. Wanting to be held. Disappearance in punctuation. Silence at the full stop. Sirens yelling. A basil plant with a death wish. Empty offices lit up for no one. Humming with the subway roar. Phil Collins sees your true colors in a Target store. Call it vision. Ask your doctor for prescriptions. Ask for the right channel. Ask for something. Don’t linger. Stand on the right, walk on the left. Here is nothing. A giant asterisk. Hiding in the interval. Longing in the in-between. Fresh sheets. Clean scent. An absent voice. Somber green. Red flicker. Liquidity traps. The lengths of austerity. Lacking a question mark. Fearing the certainty. Perhaps that’s wind.
B.
Trust it for a paper plane. Trust it for soft violence. For the placid pain. For magic as a memory. Language is a folding screen. Toujours en route. Wanting to travel closer. Worry about shadows. Worry about worry. Imagining that’s recursive. Missed calls. Aural invoice. The tide has gone. Wanting to be young with someone. Kids building figures out of foam. Counting the maritime. Offering shells. Apologizing in advance for the feather conjuring you. And the noise escaping the static.
3.
A.
Old wooden doors. Mounds of guns melted in November sun, blue fabric floating over roofs of clay. Stuck in time, a long while ago. The scent of sheets dried in sandy wind. Hidden skin behind starched cotton. Writings on the wall. Three-hundred and thirty-three saints. Miracles forgotten. Stored in a box. Cedar cinders and shade as sole companions.
B.
Quivering tents past moving dunes. Memory as metonymy. Sweet, impossible, omnipresent repetition. Canned vegetables warmed in the sun and melting in earthy colors on the stairs. Long ago, there was water. Long ago, there were marshes and reeds and money used for divination before the carpets spread, before it grew cold, before the night whispered, before the black stone spirals echoed the melted clay of language’s languor for lost addresses.