Traces (excerpt)
Samira Negrouche
Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson

A finger realigns the threads /// a finger cuts /// a finger inverts /// a finger presses /// a finger slips /// a finger goes and comes back /// a finger inverts the threads /// a finger fits /// a finger gives you a drink /// a finger pulls fabric over the baby’s cheek /// a finger smiles /// a finger tastes /// a finger measures /// a finger dips into mercury /// a finger spools threads /// a finger follows you /// a finger measures you and in measuring you, it measures the distance /// a finger scrutinizes you /// a finger asks you the question again /// a finger spins the threads /// a finger shakes /// a finger planes /// a finger wipes the corner of the eye /// a finger extends the invitation  ///  a finger passes through you.




My hands sway, they endlessly repeat the same gestures,
they’re inscribed in me.
Gesture is multifold.
Within gestures, there’s a pileup of gestures, which I
repeat. I don’t remember learning them, they entered
me, by magic or necessity.


There was no forced entry between us, no rape.


 

The gestures I repeat are like silence, they don’t bother
me, they have their own life, I have mine which observes
the swamp, the dawdling child in the swamp collecting
what he shouldn’t collect on this surface loaded with
what shouldn’t be there.
The wandering child collects.




Gesture is multifold
it’s silent inside me
and that’s how I see
That’s how I see you
multifold.
That’s how I touch you.


The motionless surface
vibrating, vibrating
making a sail within
breathes within.

from the book SOLIO / Seagull Books
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This excerpt comes from my translation of Samira Negrouche’s "Traces," the second book contained in "Solio" (Seagull Books, 2024). Oriented around the general theme of movement, "Traces" was collaboratively conceived with Senegalese choreographer Fatou Cissé. The “you’s” and “I’s” are left intentionally fluid and vague, rendering them more universal. Here, a finger can both flit and engage in an action as intimate as covering a nursing baby’s cheek with fabric.

Nancy Naomi Carlson on "Traces"
photograph of James Longenbach from the American Poetry Review
"Once or Twice: On James Longenbach"

"Jim wrote in The Resistance to Poetry of how a lyric poem seeks to make itself listenable, how its sounds seek to invite us into it, making us feel that we will be listened to in return. His poems make good on those claims, which bear repeating because we want to relive and revise (not merely to remember) a dream of connection. In listening and being listened to by poems, we hear how our need for intimacy—and our intimacies themselves—cannot quite rest in peace. "

via RARITAN QUARTERLY
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Cover image of G.C. Waldrep's book, The Opening Ritual
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G. C. Waldrep on Ecopoetry Now 


"For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address....Description is always an act of translation. And in so doing propose, to some notional reader, that something could be shared. To address, meaning to conjure that notional reader (or auditor) explicitly, via deixis: you. You there. Not you, but you. You, defined as whatever or whomever the poem is addressing. Sometimes I think 'you' is the most complicated word in the English language. 'You' is always a revelation to me."
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