Now the deer fever tears apart cells inside my ravaged, already so harrowed leather body. In my breath, tracks of moon wind are smarting against the throat and windpipe. I have moved around the deer, I have fastened my fibers to the hard dancing deer. Steam rose from frozen wells, ice floes chafed the channel, cold sweat broke out of the skin wall between my being and the cold. It was a hopelessly treacherous time.

I have moved around the rare glass deer of September. I have moved around the timid water, by the closed border of the fiber deer. And the crack rushes through the black glass. It crackles and shimmers, it quakes in the deer, it quakes and quivers in the breastbone deer.

The leather falcon flies north in sky-shrieking torture. There is a light in the deer, there is a light in the deer, there is a light deep inside the cavity deer! Now the blood surface song surface is heaving! It quakes through me and the deer. Fibers ache in my sharp border. Now the painful deer tears now it breaks. Now the deer and I burst and are exposed -

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Collages
images by Tom Benson
poems by Aase Berg
translated by Johannes Göransson

link

We Thread Up Lizards

We are going to gather lizards. Lizards that glow red in the flood sheen. We are going to place them next to the wax girl’s body while she sleeps in a deep trance. The big iron pounds. We are going to gather lizards for the night. Adrian hates me. Adrian hates me, he hates himself against me, I feel lightning, I carry flood. The skin stone gnaws hard. We are going to pick lizards; we are going to thread lizards on a long strong poison thread. Out there song lakes wait open blue. All beautiful eyes watch us from the trees: the glass animals awaken. We are going to catch lizards: glass lizards, red pearl lizards, and place in a pattern for the night.
Now! Now! We see one of the blood corpses with a bundle of lizards in its mouth. It has happened. How can we now live? How can we live?
For we will now no longer gather lizards.

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.

Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson

Aase Berg is one of the most important young poets in Sweden right now. She’s got four books out. She’s the editor of BLM, a leading literary journal, and Vertigo, a publisher of pornographic writings, and she frequently writes articles for national newspapers and journals. She’s a founder of the surrealist group “Det Stora Saltet” (“The Great Salt”). Johannes translations of her poems have previously been published in Bitter Oleander, Conduit and Skidrow Penthouse, and they will soon be published by Octopus on the web. (From La Petite Zine)

These poems have been published online at Double Room and La Petite Zine (www.webdelsol.com)

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Selection:

With the burning of the ark, the newly freed animals began to eat the mannequin body part protoplasm as well as the embedded sea urchins that had protected them from the malevolent probing of past starfish fossils that were now transformed into quaint, wooden museum pieces – now a rather harmless version of an earlier virulent terror.

The compass dial made a quarter turn, and then everything returned to normal. Or had it? The pipes remained in their respective shower stalls, with incoming beams of sunlight playing across their white-painted surfaces, every now and then revealing the red dial of plumbing telepathy, yet the pipes remained where they had been installed, with their geletin neurological coatings, and yet coyotes had infiltrated the shower complex, investigating the creations of men that had vanished a long time ago.
Despite the presence of the coyotes, the white pipes remained unscathed and they still communicated with each other.

She plays blood with the moon’s golden salamander, then plays flesh and finally dream, before passing backwards through myth and evolution…

In the spyglass of your eerie listening threads, you might find your shadow planted like a ghost, in the center of a brightly spinning table…. and measured by purring triangles of darkness.

You sleep through her storms, with your heart of rain and your mind of wind, your cognition of lightning and pathology of lava, or ice, depending upon the phases of the moon, your bones of aurora and memory of ash, flesh of stars and blood of lunar dust. You dream beside yourself, watching, shedding your skin …

She knows you, and by her antlers she touches you, etching the layers of your light with her shadow of incestuous jellyfish. She eats you, and you come to birth in the milkweed pods, like a torch out of cabalistic breath.

Your history congeals in the lost-wax language of a many dimensional fluid, more mirror than river, less arc than scythe and you sign with your X when it grafts human fire onto the feral wheat…

You are balanced between twin spoons, twin thoughts and poured into the horizon of a splendid revolt against all that does not glow with the irony of your place among so many precious stones.

Spores of light…

Occurrence of Delusional Fixation Involving Winchester Cathedral

He’s scolding a cathedral. He blames the cathedral for his depressive state, which he insists could have been averted by the intervention of that edifice. A woman with whom he’d been emotionally involved has left town. Had the cathedral merely started ‘ringing its bell’, he reasons, the woman would not have departed; hence, the possibility of a reconciliation – or perhaps some form of ego-gratifying harassment – would still exist. Logically, he admits that the cathedral could not have been cognizant of the extent to which he ‘needed that gal’. Nevertheless, he reprimands it for simply standing and watching as the object of his desire walked past on her way out of the city. ‘You could have done something!’ wails the abandoned lover. Justified or not, such derision elicits a peculiar empathy: one cannot help but feel sorry for the old cathedral, its mute architecture bearing the brunt of broken-hearted humanity’s deranged plight.

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Romantic Movement

to Nancy

The boat tilts on your image on the waves between a fire of foam and the flower of moon rays, these the flags of your dreaming lips. I’m watching Venus on the ogre sky and a continent in cocoons.

Soon all the butterflies of desire shall manifest o prescience of life becoming poetic… and poetry the incense of the dream. A street and a forest interchange their clothing, that tree of telephones, this television of nuts and berries – the air edible music.

King Analogue
Queen Image
Prince Liberty…
… Garden of imperious images, life is a poem someday to be lived: the feast of our hearts on fire, the nerves supplying spice, blood coursing a glow of insects, our eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition.

The whisper of the inter-voice to wrap you in the mantle of marvelous power, with the secret protection of the forest that falls asleep in fire whose ores become transmined only for love – all your steps will lead to the inner sanctum none but you behold, your shadow putting on the body of metaphoric light.

The stone I have tossed into the air of chance shall come to you one great day and exfoliate the original scarab, the carbuncle of delights, the pomegranate inviolate, the sonorous handkerchief of the Comte de Saint-Germaine, all the reinvented perfumes of ancient Egypt, the map of the earth in the Age of Libra when the air shall distribute our foods, the sempiternal spectrum of sundown at Segovia (the stork carrying the golden egg from the Templar’s tower) Chief Seattle’s lost medicine pouch, our simultaneous presence in all the capitals of Europe while traveling Asia and listening to the million-throated choir of tropical birds, your lost candlewax empire, a madrone forest to live inside of, which we can wrap in a set of “secret bags” and open on our wanderlust, the turbulent cry beneath the oceans, the extinct bird calls in a magic vessel Christian Rosenkreutz dropped on his way out of the Damcar, beads of coral dissolving the last motors, the redolent eyes of the first born seers, the key to the bank of sanity, the ship of honey at the height of storms through which we sail to new islands rising from the sunken continents and the bridge between sleep and waking we will traverse in constant possession of “the great secret” become transparent as a tear drop – with no other work but the genius of present life.

The prose poem is the emphasis here, in its most poetic and imaginative forms…