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Not books, but
a street opened my mouth like a doctor’s spatula.

One by one, streets introduced themselves
with the names of national
murderers.

In the State Archives, covers
hardened like scabs
over the ledgers.

*

Inside a tiny apartment
I built myself
into a separate room.

*
Inside a tiny apartment
I built myself
into a separate room,

peopled it
with the Calibans
of plans for the future.

Future that runs on the schedule of public buses,
from the zoo to the circus,
what future;
what is your alibi for these ledgers, these streets, this
apartment, this future?

*

In the purse which held—
through seven wars—
the birth certificates
of the dead, my grandmother
hid—from me—
chocolates. The purse opened like a screaming mouth.

*

The purse opened like a screaming mouth.
Its two shiny buckles watched me
through doors, through walls, through jazz.

Who has taught you to be a frightening face, purse?
I kiss your buckles, I swear myself your subject.

*

August. Apples. I have nobody.
August. For me, a ripe apple is a brother.

For me, a four-legged table is a pet.

*

In the temple of Supermarket
I stand
like a candle

in the line to the priestesses who preserve
the knowledge of sausage prices, the virginity
of milk cartons. My future, small
change.

*

Future that runs on the schedule of public buses.
Streets introduced themselves
with the names
of national murderers. I build myself
into a separate room,
where memory,
the illegal migrant in time, cleans up
after imagination.

*
Bus stops:
My future, an empty seat.

*

In a room where memory strips the beds—
linens that hardened like scabs
on the mattresses—I kiss

little apples—my brothers—I kiss the buckles
that watch us through walls,
through years,
through jazz,
chocolates from a purse that held—through seven wars—
birth certificates of the dead!

Hold me, brother-apple.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week is by our 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize winner Valzhyna Mort, who is also one of our recently announced 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize judges (alongside Adam Dickinson and Claudia Rankine)!

In the past few weeks, we have featured poems addressing the multifaceted relationship between poetry and translation. Valzhyna Mort is another prolific poet-translator who translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She received the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid, out this October with Ugly Duckling Presse.

Mort’s poem, “Bus Stops: Ars Poetica,” from her Griffin-winning collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected, gives us a “poetic map for the many themes of remembrance and loss in the book and, more importantly, the ways in which the state attempts to re-write memory” (Grandbois). Her translation of Barskova similarly takes us through the archives of memory “post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature” and “confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse.” (Ugly Duckling).

Purchase Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Mort’s Griffin-winning collection here. 

Purchase Air Raid, Mort’s translation of Barskova, here.

It’s fears slow and fascinating that enter life each morning at coffee time while she wonders if tomorrow there’ll be war and brusquely as she does each morning slices bread and cheese. It’s gestures of uncontrollable avidity that proliferate in the throng and its worldly febrility, its parquet fever on the trading floor and stage. It’s hesitations, heart cries that crisscross broad avenues full of shade and dust that attract and make us think of our legs and elbows, our knees too when desire bumps and bounces words and feelings upward, it’s simple things with prefixes like cyber or bio that hold thoughts fast, float them a moment till we believe them aquatic and marvellous. It’s certainties that in tiny increments of dust and light are soon mixed with our tears. It’s inexplicable feelings made of small hurts strung over long years and vast horizons, it’s blues ideas that settle in where the happiness of existing threatens to take the breath away or to lodge itself in the throat like an instrument of fervour. It’s glimmers of intoxications impossible to look at for long, thoughts so precise that engage us beyond shade and wind, far beyond crude words, so noisy so terribly close to silence that the world all around seems suddenly engulfed in high seas and continual rustling like the music in our heads that in one stroke of the bow dislodges all that resists torment. It’s underlined passages, fragments of happiness that traverse the body and raise bridges all around because elsewhere and in the wild blue yonder they say there’s euphoria. It’s written down with bruises, abundance of life burst to fullness in a world and its niches of worn paths that lick at the shadow of bones.

Notes on the Poem
Our 500th Poem of the Week continues to celebrate translation, polyvocality and artist collaboration. Here is “Soft Link 1” from the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection, Notebook of Roses and Civilization (Coach House Books) by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure translated from the French Written by Nicole Brossard.

Of the collection, the judges said: “Over her four decades of writing and depublishing poems and novels and essays-textes, Nicole Brossard has always shone an investigative light on every word that comes to her, and turned a demanding ear to each item of punctuation and notation. She sees the universe in the word for sand, and knows that it could be sable mouvant. So the translators of Nicole Brossard have to make poems we will love to read the way a carpenter loves a finished table.” 

Listen to Majzels, Moure, and Brossard read Soft Link 3 in this stunning polyphonic performance.

They beat me even though I did nothing

I don’t know what day it was

But they beat me on the beach

They beat me with iron paws

The mayor ordered the police superintendent to beat me

The police superintendent ordered an officer to beat me

The officer ordered his dogs to attack me

Then someone beat me with iron paws

Then someone kicked me with iron boots

Then someone shot me

Then someone buried me in the sand

Then someone scooped me out of the sand and dumped me
somewhere

And I was dead

But I could feel the sand on my body

I could feel the sand filling my mouth

I could feel the sand in my eyes

There was an earthquake in my eyes

There was a tornado in my mouth

But after the storms passed it was peaceful and I was dead

And they beat me even though I did nothing

They said I was illegal

They said I was an immigrant

They said I was an illegal immigrant who roamed the streets in a gang

They said I raped people

They said I killed people

They said I smuggled drugs in my gastrointestinal tract

They said I didn’t speak the right language

They said my boss exploited me and I tried to kill him

They said my boss treated me well and I tried to kill him

They said my heart was dark

They said I peddled in blood

They said this is only war and that I had the audacity to think
my body could resist the state

Let death come quickly    I asked

Let death be easy

But I did not know how long it would take

I did not know I would be under the sand forever

I did not know that in Chicago the bodies do not die when they
have been strangled or riddled with bullets

A journalist asked the mayor why they killed us

I am not responsible     said the mayor

There will be an inquest    said the mayor

We will bring the perpetrators to justice     said the mayor

He was wearing a slim fitting suit and he looked handsome as
the hurricane entered his mouth

He was wearing a slim fitting suit and he looked handsome as he
pretended he did not live in a city of state-killed cadavers

He had gel in his hair and his shoes were nicely polished

I died and I died again and a voice said something about hope

Another voice said you pay a big price for hope

I dragged myself around the sand and I tried to make it to the
water because I thought the water might carry me away but each
time I took a step closer to the water the water moved farther
from my body and there were faces in the water and they were
calling to me and I was trying to get to them

It’s what you do when you are dead

But every time I took a step toward the water the water drew
farther away

And the faces in the water were murmuring and their murmurs
grew louder and louder as I moved nearer and farther

And it is only war     a voice said      by way of explanation     as
he photographed my dead body on the sand

And I was dead though I was still breathing when I finally made
it to the water

And in the water there was another war going on in the waves

It was only the beginning of the war that would kill me again
and again

Notes on the Poem
This week’s poem, “Lake Michigan, Scene 1,” is excerpted from Daniel Borzutsky’s 2019 shortlisted collection, Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press). For the past few weeks, our Poem of the Week focused on translated poems, poems about translation, as well as poems written by poet-translators. Daniel Borzutzky’s translations to Spanish include Raúl Zurita's Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010) and Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008), among others. Although not a translation per se, Lake Michigan is written from the perspective of someone who doesn’t “speak the right language.” 

Of the collection, the judges said: “Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan  is an elegant and chilling masterpiece of dramatic speech in a tradition of activist, political poetry that encompasses works as diverse as Pablo Neruda’s  Canto General and Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror. One of the theses embodied in its multiplicity of voices might be said to be that state-sponsored (or state-acquiescent) violence creates ghosts – ghosts who, by continued speaking, come to stand in for the people from whose histories they have been created, people who are therefore never truly dead. Technically brilliant in its use of repetition and variation, leavened with touches of embittered, and yet, in the end, resilient, drollness, Lake Michigan  is an eloquent, book-length howl, a piece of political theatre staged in a no-man’s land lying somewhere between the surreal and the real.”