Three Poems
Lali Tsipi Michaeli
Legend of the body
Well, I was gone
it was on the day the mouth widened open in front of
a vacant audience
a hall world, devoid of ears
and started shouting
As it happened
the hearing merits were sealed
and the hall world faded out to mute
and silence was hovering over the face of the earth
such
a white silence
well bleached
You know,
unlike a wedding dress
like Butoh dancers
white linen cloths with a pinch of pure soul within
white washed face
and a drizzling drop of blood that escaped the ear’s cave
all of that, in front of a vacant audience
Do you know how it feels to shout in front the hollow hall world
Familiar with the colossal reverberation?
If the hall world does not mute
the eardrum could explode
hence
there is no voice, nor any that answers
you stand alone in the life capsule
open wide within a body
translated by Nadavi Noked
Faces
You
Understand
My whole body is faces
My whole body is eyes
My whole body is lips
My whole body is chin
My whole body is forehead
My whole body is ears
My whole body is nose
My whole body is nostrils
My whole body is mimicry
My whole body is high cheekbones
My whole body is styled eyebrows
My whole body is fragments
Fragments
Fragments
My whole body is upper eyelids
My whole body is lower lids
My whole body is a living cunt spitting forth love.
Did he
Understand?
from Tractate of Faces (Ahshav, Israel, 2015)
translated by Michael Simkin
Poetry is a Hard-to-Get Girl
She is a woman with feminine intelligence
Put it in its place
Set its boundaries
Give it time to stew in its own juices
And don’t fear cutting when needed.
Don’t accept everything they think about you.
You’re nobody’s doll
Don’t harbor a grudge against your ex
Release the wound
And build yourself anew in each collection.
And never
Wax nostalgic about a poem you wrote in a previous book.
And don’t forget to give yourself a breathing space
Between one book and the next
Before you caress a new body,
Look upon a new face,
Touch a new hand,
Or embark on a new path.
from Tractate of Faces (Ahshav, Israel, 2015)
translated by Michael Simkin
Lali Tsipi Michaeli is an international Israeli poet. Born in Georgia in 1964, she immigrated to Israel at the age of seven. She has published six volumes of poetry, attended international poetry festivals in Georgia, Italy, France and Romania, and was part of a residency program for talented writers in New York at 2018. Forthcoming is The Mad House (Adelaide Books, 2020). She teaches Hebrew at Ben Gurion University, has one son and lives in Tel Aviv by the sea.