ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Aase Berg; translated by Johannes Göransson


Fox

We sat at opposite ends of the table. Riffraff were all around us. The whites of his eyes glittered. A sexwoman caught, with a desperate hunger, his surgeon's gaze. That night he would tear his hands through her flesh material, her teats and the sloppy skin folds. Her herpes tongue was already smearing his jugular with fox secretion. The liplarvae writhed, dying among the butts in the ashtray. I looked on. My vulva ached. The monstrosity wound itself around the intestines, gnawed lightly on the frail surface of the belly bladder with its small nip teeth, and wanted out. Outside the window, the streets rumbled. I hallucinated a bit, saw tall trunks fall and crack far out in the woods. The rotgut throbbed venomously against the intestinal system. I downed another glass - finally the monstrosity was anesthetized on the bottom of the creek. Then we waited for weeks that never came, while the ages rolled their cogwheels over our heads.

When I came home, there was a little snail stuck to my throat. On the street corner I had seen a flock of marrowpierced, skinstarved silvercats tear a dead fox to shreds. Alba slept in the sheets, pale-blue naked. From the ceiling hung red, almost glowing spider webs. Through the water-damaged walls, condensation bubbled out. I could feel the brain scream out for mental activity, but the intestines were up to my throat and it was impossible to gather my thoughts in the heat. The drunken screams of the street devils and hooligans in the street still echoed against the windows. Suddenly Alba was awake and placed her kisses on my incomprehensibly alert, throbbing body. Her breath felt cool as a corpse, as with the lemurs. The mirrors and glass lay shattered in a pile on the middle of the floor: also here, the anxiety had burst forth.

The door opened. He came home. A bird sprawled in the sky. Now they stitched in the doll of mine, now they tore apart her mouth until her lips almost smiled. Alba bled nose-blood, I pretended to sleep, but the monstrosity woke up: I bit hard into the sheets. His hands were still soaked in female spores and fox juices, but also something else, and I understood that he had gone too far, much too far. Alba still lay on her back. I screamed into the pillow. Alba lay on her back and the thin blood ran slowly, darkly out of her nostrils. He smelled of snail acid, the white of his eyes glittered. He took out the nice, long staff; the nice, long staff of glass. It had a little prong at the tip, a little fiber beak. Then I relaxed. The booze abated; the monstrosity grew still. I smiled into the pillow, and maybe waited for the final drubbing.


Mastiff

The sun bladder hangs high and red: the fever scrotum weighs heavy. The trucks roar down below, the mastiff dog gurgles and growls and tugs at its chain, and it seems like the metals of this powerful city are exploding with anxiety. The amphibians suffer burned and flayed in the hangars, and we hear their shrill throat sounds. The substances are fermenting, the throats are corroding and bubbling, things are rumbling and crumbling behind us. Adrian is carrying the blind snake patiently cautiously in the muddy palms of his hands. Out of a slit in the wool, pink flesh is glowing. But we walk dazzlingly toward the still-smoking planet that lies torn and crushed by the wall ruin at the edge of the city. In the harbor, the heavy ships sing and the steel chafes screams. The oil the magma boils slowly in the basins, the cisterns. Adrian carries the blind snake and maybe he smiles. We walk outward and he maybe smiles.


Shard

Where one by one you turned my faces up
toward the sun's surface
and drank them like deer water.