A site for poetry, for ways of thinking and writing that are impossible to consolidate with a political or conceptual vocabulary.
Mask Staff are everywhere and nowhere.
The Grapevine Telegraph by Lotta Thießen
Fell through a distance in the game
I
someone who is absent is someone who is absent
if you want it
it is it you want
not someone who is absent
a hole is not a hole
but a way down is not below
but a distance in the game you are
someone whose presence is absence
there is no need to lose everything
you could have been in this life
you are somewhere else
you arrive before a softness
and your composition is such
that a barricade of books makes you
as strong as you are soft
without alliance
your presence is soft and malleable
a barricade of books and your absence
presently battle each other and in losing
you’re condemned to come back to life
II
you’re condemned to come back to life on some days
your past is a box of shroedinger’s cats
you contemplate on other days
they jump at your face
and claw out the memories
carved into your cheeks
you are pieces of fallen flesh
III
you are pieces of fallen flesh
runes that indicate a novel perception
of evidence as rotten meaning
which means several of your breasts have started to fall
on the ground they exert an impossible stench
working in this absence
desirous for a severance
from the absence
you are eating my hands
and I’m eating yours
your finger nails
travel to my retina
my interior itch
in the game difference is measured
by degrees of alienation
in what’s present there is no space
for your absence is impossible
you fall through a distance in the game
IV
you fall through a distance in the game
into a seclusion in which with care
your absence is opened to what comes to corrode it
I know how you got here
because I forgot
that nothing disappears
even eaten by what we produce
our limbs permeate what eats us
wash it away with us
we are toxic dirt in rivulets
our shrinking skins lie bare
the absence of the future
runs into our matter
without replacing the past
the fact that you exist
lets you appear in the dreams of others
the fact that they’re forgotten
means you’re remembered
as memories are fat with oblivion
and matter is composed of the forgotten
something breakable between your teeth
like a morning
breaks your face
like dawn
yells
V
like morning
your face breaks at dawn
with a yell
I stick my roseate fingers into
the soft sludge you vomit
and we wade through it
for years to drive through your skin
to vacate
cause without form we love you best
walking through you and not meaning anything
presently washing upon the beaches of your past
in lines that return like tides
coming upon the words for a friend there in the sand
to write in the clearest sense I can summon
despite knowing
what can come to these words
can come to us
memories of teeth riding the crest of waves
the mouth we throw our bodies into
the present’s ice cold digestion
of days that break against us
VI
on days that break us
we walk into each others graves
for dialectics with our joys to present us with a sadness
with our sadness to present us with a force
cigarettes fall like leaves from our mouths
we are the forest growing on the beach
our dogs are habits gone astray
I’m something vague and impossible
my memories are sirens sitting on rocks
they say you cannot digest an ocean
and drowning it has been eaten
and it eats you
no part of our body is your body
all our bodies are our bodies
fuck the stasis that ruptures their return
VII
the return is breaking and repetition
at once a stone and the flood exiting it
the hardening of a fact and its rejection
the poetics of this state are the poetics of shame
the embarrassment of having lost
a quality of love
rather than the object of it
the shape it takes on in our common body
in which words may have replaced silence
but silence has been accepted as our common place
or the repetition of that which has no meaning as solace
our loves are the fact and the dust of it
making its way into the pores of your absence
it nestles and spreads in the crates of your planets morning
it will never leave you
our hands are refracted in the light
have lodged in your eye sockets
hollowing out as you try to wash them away with your tears
are all the directions you lost when you lost us
we will eat you
and all the directions you lost
Lotta Thießen is a poet and translator living in Berlin. She co-organizes the reading and translation series artiCHOKE, and edits the internationalist feminist poetry publication Vírgulentxs. "fell through a distance in the game" is a poem from Fragments of Baby, forthcoming in 2019.
