Johannes Göransson
Follow my voice follow
my voice I follow your voice
into the malignant trousseau
into poetry I follow
the rabble the voices
the birthmark on your torso:
a puncture wound
a sign for syre
I don't want the butterflies
to die in the rabble
so I take my headphones off
so I take my rabbled body
till riddarsporrar till syrener
till den råttiga dikten
about my eyelids mina ögon
lockar I am translating it
till mina döttrar in
the color of oxidized metal
you are the color of stain
glass window I am the color
red where are you hiding
where are your punctured lungs
my beautiful pen inlaid
with bird bone is what I use
to write as I think to myself
I think to my daughter
det står en pöbel på min trapp
I think to my daughter
dom har tagit fotografier
av tomma plast kassar
och andra krigsgrejer från
sommaren props for
my ratted-out body sound
like the morning after the riot
it should be snowing
I can't hear a word
I'm cutting flowers for the riot


Flickorna are in thick of it they trash
their cuties while the cops do that
thing with torsos and I have a vision of rats
in the hallucination I look like en oskuld
when I get my killability on for the rabble
I have a femur I have a pain in my ankle
I must have been running through the streets
again pollen is on my skin and in
my beautiful long hair I have solen
as a mother I sing-song for the police
snedsträck the rabble wants to possess me
but the girls they want to kill
me with their candy how can I see it
their mouths are closed
are they in berlin I'm in stockholm
it smells like urine on this street because
I'm wealthy snedsträck I refuse to steal
this painting the teenagers are whistling
in the street how do they know
I'm with them how do they know
I'm watching a movie about innocence
it's a silent movie men änglarna pratar
in captions speak in numbers
through the radio the interrogators
wear rubber gloves but they can't
go through mirror they can't go through
they don't understand poetry
their pictures are already on a pop music
time is out of whack there's no place
in heaven for you mina vackra poeter
but the underground is full of heaven
we will never win anything
the poodle is yapping in the street it must
be the devil will you come back no


Flowers for the rabble
and I'm scared of being infected
in the lilacs and the infection in
the lilacs will return me to
summer to the movie screen
where I was born
to photograph bodies in
butcher shops poodles so
to speak in the faust
sick afterparty I'm talking ruins
with the devil you have to be
a foreigner to make art out
of other people's ruins
he tells me you can't belong
to ruins because you're
bleeding from the forehead
amazingly he's right but l say
l can belong to anywhere l can
take a photograph
even if that makes me the killer
but then l see my photo of the dead
girl and she has photographed
my eyes l will bleed
longer in the poem of
the afterworld now that I belong
to the afterparty her lungs
belong to the environment
she has been kissed by it
mercury l have been kissed
too l have been told to slash
the diorama l won't
I'm not as clean as that l carry
the violent leaf in my mouth
from the journal FENCE
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"Summer" is the name of a book-length poem coming out next spring (Tarpaulin Sky Press). It's an ekphrastic poem, a translingual poem, an elegy for my daughter, an elegy for summer, a poem as toxin, a poem based on failed translations, a poem in which the Swedish words are something like parasites and the English words are hard to pronounce, but most of all it's a poem about being done with poetry and about drowning in poetry.
 
"Etel Adnan, Lebanese American Author and Artist, Dies at 96"

"Etel Adnan, an influential Lebanese American writer who wrote a seminal novel about the Lebanese civil war and achieved acclaim in her later years as a visual artist, died on Sunday in Paris. She was 96. Her novel about a kidnapping in Lebanon has become a classic of war literature. She was in her 80s when her art started to draw international attention."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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