Re [f] lections for Claude Cahun and Alice Rahon

 

and

 

Three Prose Poems

 

 

  by David Annwn

 

 

 

 

Re [f] lections for Claude Cahun and Alice Rahon

 

 

 

The Invisible Quest

 

No.  I follow the wake left in air, trail in water, mirage in the pupils. 

         I can’t relax.  The abstract world of dreams shuts me down just as much as hard reality.  What to do?  Choose an abbreviated mirror and reflect, make a part answer for the whole?  Mistake a mud-smear for a halo?  Refusing to break myself against walls, I smash my body on windows.  All the black night long.

         Waiting for some clarity, some vision, I’ll corner and grapple with myself.  Already, I’m packing weapons:  these truly useless words, against yours truly, yet someone has to try, if only to vault into the void?

This is all bullshit.  Negligible.  A work-out for the eye perhaps.

 

Claude Cahun, Trans. D. Annwn

 

 

 

 

 

Refractions

 

Come.  The long beach and the missing footprints:  out of this vanished struggle these brilliant glimmers; you eschewed artistic skill, in thrall to the sense of all that anyone could be, manifested through the strangeness of their contradicting skins, that fierce sidelong look of accusation for anyone who’d negate the unique first and last species that we all are separately, to claim a right for that, and make the secret open.  Gender is only a part of the secret amongst the refracting surfaces, the challenge is refusal.  Yes, you struck out through zones insinuating and hemming us in, to re-make the idea of fashioning itself as something natural as air and you’d go and did do through hell for that.

 

 

 

 

 

Little skin

 

Little skin of turquoise attacked everywhere by red cotton claws an arrow has the redhead’s number smells bad and always wears a spine of black feathers for the spine of sticklebacks has windows for the spokes of King Thule’s wheel that don’t enter by the window or by the door small setbacks are stones the reverse of great triumphs or vice versa as the pianist’s hands are always frozen the piano’s Eskimo who takes out his knife of walrus-bone the almanac emptying itself of dry debits of interplanetary velocity isn’t to blame for loves so frequently lost that the reindeer’s age solidifies the ice-cold of the floe with the turquoise skin.

 

Alice Rahon Trans. D. Annwn

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Prose Poems

 

 

 

Glance

 

Glance that reads the stalled stages of attraction in anything:  coral, petroglyph, semi-precious burdens of the automatic whorls dictated by spirits of the back of us coming through in fugitive spurts, the cost of moving and encountering presence in fissile atmosphere, and through the sear of fiery union and bifurcation; blue and green, registers of extreme pressure are caught millennia:  scatter-tracks captured in stone; blueprints for neural nativities and god-sprung genetic syntax.  These combinations scorch, blench and, freeze-dried, flake off seawards yet dramas of that magnitude held deep, unlock themselves to you, your thunderstruck prismatic key.

 

 

 

Red Lid

 

My first is in container park but not in distribution my second is in luxury, performance and style but not in any happenstance my third is core cover and no annual maximum my fourth is black data and a hard act to swallow my second is in offshore safe trading my first is in my, my my is in little i my indulgence is craved, my weather is spy crimson, my mother’s brother is exactly, my concern is whelming my tax status is a tough letter and begging the issue my last is properly registered in exile my first has rights reserved and raised questions and who are you sleeping partners with words anyway?

 

 

 

Kerviel’s Curve

 

A conjure hand who let the course run its law got the lowdown got to get on up charisma not on my watch, close down every client endpoint retinal configuration engine idling malware burning memos for unknown foes significant, ipso facto a tad too risky for few in the know foes in the new, thief goes speech assignative, iconise deep six, floor the inventory on floor six and bury the evidence of insider exotic trading in futures seriously nouvelle vague scratch that make that retro ensorcelled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Annwn is a recipient of a Ferguson Centre award for African and Asian Studies.  He lectures for the Open University in the north of England.  Among his books are the collaborations, It Means Nothing To Me (with Geraldine Monk), and The Last Hunting of the Lizopard (with Alan Halsey.)  His most recent collection is Bela Fawr’s

Cabaret (Westhouse/Ahadada).  LipglossEry is forthcoming.