Three Poems
The Sound of a Mind Taping Over Itself;
Coming to Terms with the World I Will Never Birth
for Như Xuân Nguyễn
I remember the first time I forgot. Elsewhere
was a constant, then. Estradiol is another word
for this is your body and a needle is how the
sun is spelled sown as it’s ripped into sky, how
I was digging for something in my skin and
found remorse — memory awake to this all too
sudden somewhere. From these windows I
attempt a theory of trees, how they mushroom
like these breasts I forget to remember, how
the officer saw heels, dress, tears, and decided:
ma’am; how do you look at me and say that
when you know. Tell me, again, what you know.
Gespenster
It was an hour chewed by the clock, days
wedged between the brain’s teeth. It was
this mind fastening to another in an attempt
to overwrite its history. It was
a world I’d never
birth, please don’t
mention it. It
was how the midnight
put itself inside you and said work. It
was a town called Hauppauge
and the land was all flat and
swallowed. It was
this fact I threw at every other
moment of my life. It
was a sapling pushing up through
concrete the waking up
at the bottom of a fall. It was
how the ground inverts as you pass
through it. It was
sitting so long in the dark our
landscapes rendered bare, our
landscapes not our landscapes. It was
the sky, someone’s property. It was
another collage against wasteland, another
nail in his fucking cantos. It was a mind and the mind
is not capital. Remember, we will
haunt you into memory of this.
We Who Want the Weight of Rain Around Us
after Brendan Joyce
The gnaw of wind against bodies and their exhaust
of atmosphere and lung. Concave, like the barracks
at the end of the mind where even the clouds
have reached maximum capacity and the rain too
is falling. And the country is wracked
with the knowledge of rain:
of bodies drenched in capital, of the dream
of sleeping in, of this sky and its slow return to morning.
Even the trees immolate in solidarity of this
burning earth; i
heard only whispers i
the trees, i mean, i
can never guarantee safe passage
in sleep.
Even the rain and its cold fingers against
us; the saxophone tossing its sounds around
the voice againt but louder
the lines and their jagged
enjambment / performed
a perfect arson.
Even the wind, unbeknownst to itself, is a class traitor
shivering insurrectionists. Even the sun
and our sweat. Even the
stars and — Say it — even the moon,
with only a segment of squall
struck by streetlight —
Even the moon — excerpt search term anywhere
which is my own interior / this purple, this barking
circular empty. To the lavish dapper catalogued air
strikes peppered across its asphalt heart.
The city said what to the unhomed and cold — Even
the moon, in its lurid umbraic oculum — hates cops
and urges onward
Mathilda Cullen
Mathilda Cullen is a trans woman, poet, and translator. Her works include “Trace Happenings” (marlskarx, 2019) and translation of Ernst Toller’s “Poems of the Imprisoned.” She runs marlskarx, an
anti-press dedicated to publishing queer poets of the left, and Prolesound, a podcast and archive of contemporary leftist poetry.
Twitter: @mathildork