[from the MARGENTO collection forthcoming from Casa de Editură Max Blecher]
by Margento
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The Euro-Gate
MARGENTO
Hungry Hell – Romania 1948
after Randall Jarrell
Out of little Paris, as if waking from a dream, into the slammer
an empty belly and enigma cell: tomorrow…
How long shall I survive, how much room for miracles on a map,
stigma of blood and shit on the wall…
Still they washed me out of the cell with a hose and fed me to the hounds.
The Amero-Gate
Gwendolyn Brooks
We Real Cool
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The Afro-Gate
MARGENTO
The Mau Mau Head
There was a Mau Mau head
or Uma Uma with an ivory forehead
in the year when Brooks wrote
the poem in the beans
eaters. It was growing in a Kikuyu
woman’s womb when a rusty key
pushed by a brave Mau Mau pierced her
in the massacre of the sacred independence
from the British Empire.
The Anglos let them kill
each other and then grabbed
the baby’s ivory head
and carved a Churchill bust out of it.
Little; quaint; like a clump
of barbed wire pushed up
the Moldovan prisoners’
asses by the Transnistrian sep-
aratchiks screaming: Here is Ro
mania for you, the whole of it… a high-wire
act of diplomacy rolling
through intestine feuds
and side-shows a drunk leader’s dream
wrapped up in ivory, corn, and oil
slowly making it into the Oval Office…
Obama, fifty years after the grain
of snooker and death in Brooks’
book gets carried away by a wave
of memories… His grandpa beaten up
by the Brits in that Kenyan prison…
and looks at the bust and it gets on
his nerves and he checks out the head
can’t get the head out of his head temples
beating like Khrushtchev’s shoe on the UN table
like a German boot and a Russian boot
playing hopscotch over Poland…
he grabs it and pitches it like a baseball
all the way back to the palace in London.
But the globe stops shining up in the sky,
a fetus revived in the light’s body,
Kikuyu mama’s womb, mother of the world.
THE AUSTRO-GATE
Glenn Colquhoun (Aotearoa/ New Zealand)
When I Am in Doubt
a poem for surgeons
When I am in doubt I talk to surgeons.
I know that they will know what to do.
They seem so sure.
Once I talked to a surgeon.
He said that when he is in doubt
He talks to priests.
Priests will know what to do.
Priests seem so sure.
Once I talked to a priest.
He said that when he is in doubt
He talks to God.
God will know what to do.
God seems so sure.
Once I talked to God.
He said that when he is in doubt
he thinks of me.
He says I will know what to do.
I seem so sure.
UVERTURES
This is the season, this the day, the hour;/ At sunrise thou shouldst come…
MARGENTO – Riffing with Elizabeth Bishop: Old Nova Scotia Sound in New Mui Ne
as I walk my feet sink in the red ground
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
taking in the colorful tombs
scattered on the sliding dune
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
with Zen swastikas carved into stone and
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
the sea blinking at the deserted place.
Without my getting to look into the distance
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
at the waves, corals start to wake
up in my ankles waving with poisoned fish in the
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . .
MARGENTO
Biker in Saigon
What? Can’t do that
anymore? Ooo, to carry it all, my memories
and quandaries, the family
riding piggyback, still stuck… until it says “go!” and I cut
corners like the Americans who used to reap
Vietnamese women’s breasts in the past?…
How? How to wait at the lights
in a hive full of hum
just for show? and with no food
for the multitudes on a moto
R cycle in line in net
wORks of roads and stuck
shaking at
idle like a turtle crushed under
the weight of a centuries-old elephant in the swamps?
When, now, when is it going to end? The mound, the moon, one
ivory yellow light-bulb on one sema
phore blind and dangling holding me
waiting, painfully flickering like a stoma
ch… rumbling, empty wind
falls from the killed ones everything that was
left for us out of what
just wouldn’t and wouldn’t turn green.
Lý Đợi
Who Do You Take Me For?
Mourning covered all walls [including the “concrete drilling & cutting” ad stamps]
Ignominy occupied the city once thought of as a pearl [actually a piece of shit]
On 47th Alley
leaders, servants cried plaintively
young men and women, even middle-aged and weakly old-aged people are in ruins
all females lost their beauty
and males no longer had their handsomeness
and their brains were flat and smooth and full of detergents…
in those ranges of houses…
the bridegroom and all the beards raised their voices in an elegy
the bride and all the beauty girls lamented in their boudoirs
the earth was on the point of collapsing [because of the ignorant living on it]
the sky was on the point of falling [because of the insensitive contained in it]
all the family and friends of DoiLi were deeply in shame…
this place is an ambush for poetry
a cruel enemy of life, and a vile reptile against humankind…
we shed our blood
we bit our tongues, blocked up our assholes, and wrenched our own necks…
while those cowards fled upon hearing the bad news
the city became the station for invading foreigners
our children were assaulted, raped, and abused
our ancestors’ tombs were upturned
our poetry was used as toilet paper sheets…
oh, people of the city imagining itself a pearl
the more glorious in the past, the more ignominious now
noble in the past, lowly now…
who do you think you are
what do you expect
as clammed up as an oyster – why are you so mute?
as for me, a most ignominious citizen
An alcoholic saint in disease
A whimsical guy sitting on 47th Alley and philosophizing on drilling & cutting concrete
and dreaming of holes, and changes
And writing a poem in coupled couplets [in moth-eaten
language] on those things [believed by the
inhabitants here] to be so obvious!
I thought that this might end here but I must add:
that you bastards are so thoughtless
Who do you take me for?
I am vomiting over my own face and conscience.
(Lý Đợi “Who Do You Take Me For?” translated from the Vietnamese by Alec Schachner, Nguyễn Tiến Văn, and Chris Tanasescu)
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