With great gladness, we announce our 5th season of homage to the poets, the poem. This year’s launch video features a new poem: “There Was Something in Us That Recommended Our Sky Blue Belligerently.” Composed by ten Paris-based poets, it follows the vernal explosions of voices playing an adapted exquisite corpse game, wherein lines were composed remotely (each writer in their/her/his own corner of the metropolis) and passed on through email. We hope you’ll enjoy this poem in its mischief and revolt.
The text of the poem is below. Many thanks to the participating poets: Jamika Ajalon, Élodie Béra, Mélanie Blaison, Carrie Chappell, Malik Crumpler, Séverine Daucourt, Marissa Davis, Jennifer K. Dick, Alison Grace Koehler, and Jason Stoneking.
There was something in us that recommended our sky blue belligerently.
The juice we tasted was the flower's wound drooling into us,
declaring I will be the one to save the sun—
from time, from entropy, from a horizon splashed with ignorance,
from ailleurs, from my faramineuse envie d'aller further to fly férocement far away from the phénomène de fêlure,
from failure, fracture, fracassant fracas this fractalesque arabesque, oblique obfuscation of the sighted ovni (
a tangle of lavender feathers fallen from her tongue ) - must I close this parenthesis?
Like the unchained blue of southern storms, she has suddenly the eyes of an animal.
—No, less ephemeral: eyes stalked by a hunger as ageless as geology; two humming copper continents, wrecked with light
to a crisp, as cosmic comrades crumblin' fingers collapse their identities into a more trendy viral-friendly Otherness.
Vous êtes en retard. Dit-elle.
Dix cintres puis le ciel en arrière plan. La rivière,
la couette bleue sur le radiateur sèche. Plusieurs
jours se sont écoulés depuis.
Many pasts since dayed & them sighted: a woman leaving her flat, hat green as pesto, and a child, pruned of pleasure, hearing—This Way, Violet!
Violet knew she was more magenta and secretly planned revenge on the misnomer, her turquoise eyes reflecting heavens
tear-streaked, shimmering in waves of fiction and doubt... the self, the self.
No matter
I have the formula
to make a ladder
with a disaster
(je l'oublie toujours).
Ornery accolades, the unwanted desire to climb, reach, retroactively gauge: and then forget (her).
Mossy peach rock that holds each opening we will fill with light—
Burnt land by the madness of men, you must breathe
in a different kind of violence—lightning sewing the broke sky shut; mother wolf standing sentinel; jasmine petals staining the hands with incomprehensible ache.
And Grandpa Patriarchy conveniently drunk on diversity-strokes his gender-pledges allegiance to cultural pluralism-awards Otherness-apoligizes for crimes he'll never be tried for-burps, squints & aims at reparations.
Vous êtes de nouveau en retard. dit-elle.
Les jours passent et passent. Toujours le ciel
En arrière plan. La rivière le duvet bleu les
Cintres. Bruit de chaussures. Ressemblant à
Des claquettes. Quelqu’un quelque part
Assis
drooling, This way, Violet!—
Save her turquoise sun!
From fictional entropy waves,
from disaster,
oblique obfuscation, or.
Each tangle we light
breathes mad blue land,
stalks a violent light,
crumblin' Patriarchy's viral cultural.
Vous êtes en retard.