Valzhyna Mort

The wind that makes your hair grow faster opens a child’s mouth full of strawberry and sand. Slow and sure on the scales of the ocean the child’s head outweighs the sun. Inside of the wind— a blister of a church, its walls thicker than the space from wall to wall where the wind shifts shade and light like two rival chess pieces or two unmatched pieces of furniture. Inside of the church—such a stillness that when a feather floats down in a fist of dust it becomes a rock by the time it hits the ground. Organ pipes glint like a cold radiator, contained in a case of a carved tree, its branches tied up with a snake. Organ pedals, golden and plump, are the tree’s only fruit. It is all about the release of weight: the player crushes the pedals like grapes underneath his feet. My body, like an inaccurate cashier, adds your weight to itself. Your name, called into the wind, slows the wind down. When a body is ripe, it falls and rots from the softest spot. Only when a child slips and drops off a tree, the tree suddenly learns that it is barren.

When God appears before me he is a burning woman tied to a bush. Her nakedness, a missed spot on a busy canvas, where a male hand has been practicing female gestures. For instance, hanging herself like laundry over her own arm. Nipple-colons introduce this scene of medieval war: horses crowned with riders are leaving; horses’ tails, like a clock’s hands, whip flies of hours off their round thighs. Time is an insect that leaves its maggots to hatch on an open wound of a mammal. There’s more face on these thighs than on all of the women’s bodies. One, with an arrow aimed at her, hands on her bent knees as if she wanted to ski into death like a scared child, mocks the splendid horse tails with hair so red, all of her blood must have gone into it. So, it isn’t a bush on fire. It’s red hair she used as a shield. In the distance, a town burning. Impatiently, horses whip buzzing ashes. The end.

new york, madame, is a monument to a city it is TA-DA a gigantic pike whose scales bristled up stunned and what used to be just smoke found a fire that gave it birth champagne foam melted into metal glass rivers flowing upwards and things you won't tell to a priest you reveal to a cabdriver even time is sold out when to the public's "wow" and "shhh" out of a black top hat a tailed magician is pulling new york out by the ears of skyscrapers

A woman’s hallelujah! washes the foot of Mocking Bird Hill, her face eclipsed by her black mouth, her eyes rolled up like workman’s sleeves. Stirred up, a fly speaks in the tongue of the hotel doorbell, where, on the sun-ridden straw terrace my salvation means less than praise to a dumb child. Damned, blinded by ice cubes, the fly surrenders its life into the waiter’s clean hands. Behind the kitchen of the Mocking Bird Hotel a rooster repeats hallelujah! until it loses its head. A man harvests the Family Tree before his forefathers’ features have a chance to ripen on their faces. Parakeets watch him from the bare nerves of the garden. He harvests before the worms that eat his father turn into demons. Do not eat the fruit from your Family Tree. You have eyes not to see them, hands not to pick them, teeth not to bite them, tongue not to taste them even in speech. The waiter slashes the table with our bill. We descend Mocking Bird Hill without raising dust. Dogs, their fur hanging like wet feathers off their backs, piss yellow smoke without lifting a leg. Gulls smash their heads between their wings. Light lays the eggs of shadows under the shrubs. Produce shacks stand empty like football gates. What appeared blue from afar, turns green. I hold it all in, even my own urine. But the mother of vowels slumps from my throat like the queen of a havocked beehive. Higher than hallelujah! rising like smoke over the hill, I scream at the top of that green lung, why, in the Mocking Bird Hell, do you value your blood over your sweat, that bitterness over this salt, that wound over this crystal? But often, to shed light on the darkness, light isn’t enough. Often what I need is even a darker darkness. Like in those hours before the sun incriminates this hotel, his two nostrils that illuminate our benighted bodies.

Over the growing shadows fell the dead weight of  light. With a long bark mules metered the distance and turned back. Dust rose like columns of unpaid debt. Spit dried before it could reach the ground. Then the thin-barked orange trees disowned their thick-skinned fruit. Then mosquitoes spat out bad blood into the gutters and were gone. Fish was opened like a two-page book, its skeleton, caught aflame like an asp, inscribed with fire along the bone lines, then slapped on a stone face of a plate next to a Coca-Cola bottle as cold as hell. In the market fruit prices jumped up so high — the seller women turned into hawks. With a gibbous peacock brushing by their feet, in the woods where each leaf  hides a face, and each trunk a spine, and each tree a crime, where owls and angels, a man and three women were contesting an apple. The winner’s body itself was an apple with skin chewed off. Inside her breasts milk circled like a growling animal locked behind two heavy nipples. It was both day and night. Her moon-white hand on the sun-gold fruit. In her hair more stones than in a graveyard. So I followed the woman as she ate hoping if not for a bite then at least a spit in my direction. But she left nothing of that apple. Not even the memory of eating it ever.

it begins with your face of a stone where lips repose like two seals in a coastal mist of cigarette smoke you move through the streets— listing them is as useless as naming waves.

a woman moves through dog rose and juniper bushes, a pussy clean and folded between her legs, breasts like the tips of her festive shoes shine silently in her heavy armoire. one blackbird, one cow, one horse. the sea beats against the wall of the waterless. she walks to a phone booth that waits a fair distance from all three villages. it’s a game she could have heard on the radio: a question, a number, an answer, a prize. her pussy reaches up and turns on the light in her womb.

1 Where am I from? In black basilicas dragged incessantly down a cross is a man who here resembles a dress snatched from a hanger, there: thick clouds of muscles — an overcast body — embodied weather of one hardly-known country. (A country where I am from?) Dragging him, they stick their hands under his armpits. How cozy their hands are in such a warm place! Through a cut in his chest Eve watches with her one bloody eye. Of a cut in the chest — a red eyelash! But where am I from? 2 Yes, a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger. Inside black alphabet dragged incessantly down each letter is a man. 3 To a telephone in a long hallway as if to a well for water. (Well, where am I from?) (Neither mama’s nor papa’s, my round face takes after a rotary phone.) A rotary phone is my gene pool. My body rings as it runs to put my head on the strong shoulder of the receiver. Blood is talking! Blood connection is weak. Inside the receiver I hear crackle as if fire were calling. Who is this? It’s me, fire receiver. But where am I from? 4 Days of merciless snow behind the kitchen window — snow got deposited like fat under our skin. How large we’ve grown on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives, yet no one bothered to tell us that words, uttered once, crowd in the brain like in a hospital lobby. That time is supposed to heal only because once it was seen with a scalpel in its hands. You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously, pointing at lines written by a child. Think of another word with the same root. As if words can have roots. As if words didn’t come from darkness, cat-in-the-bag words, as if our human roots were already known to us. Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography, here’s a paper rag “bread, milk, butter.” What roots? What morphology? What rules of subjugation? How is it even possible to make a mistake? Here’s Physics,Chemistry, Geometry with its atlas, now, where are Vaclav’s letters, 1946? What to do about the etymology of us? Our etymology? 1946 crowds my hospital lobby. The face of a rotary phone, the face of a clock, the face of a radio on the wall — these are my round-faced progenitors. But Vaclav’s face — where? (Again a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger.) And where are the letters? One per week, in his best Sunday handwriting? Inside the receiver — fire. (How cozy are my ears in such a warm place!) But where am I from? 5 A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a first apartment — a coat, a jacket, a leather purse fat with pills, but where are the where-letters from the where-face? Evacuated face, de-evacuated face, sick not sick, stuck through face, vacuum face, lab rat face. This country was tested on Vaclav’s face. Now we can live in peace. So, where am I from? A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a deactivated face, vacated face. A face snatched from a hanger. Absence as an inner organ. 6 In a village known for a large puddle where all children fall between the two categories of those who hurt the living things and those who hurt the nonliving things, in a village known for being unknown (where am I from?), a graveyard around an old church, the frightening alphabet around the village, an alphabet on gravestones, marble letters under the moth-eaten snow. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. 7 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. A bone is a key to my motherland. 8 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. Eve watches with her one red eyelash. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. In my motherland people kneel before wells. In my motherland people pray to the crosses of flying birds. A bone is a key to my people. Among my people, only the dead have human faces. Still, where am I from? 9 Women saints in berets of golden threads, who are they by your feet, seated like pets? An angel with wings of a peacock, an angel with a human face. But who are they by your feet, seated like pets? Now, if you wear such golden berets, if you tame children and angels, if your white boneless fingers leaf through a book while I gnaw on this wooden verse, would you, holy women who wear golden berets, put the hairs on my tongue into a pigtail? 10 A mouse-tail of a word for a word-loving rodent! Inside my alphabet dragged incessantly down each frightening letter is a man. My frightening alphabet in his best Sunday handwriting. A letter addressed to lost letters, phone-face, clock-face, radio-face — face as an inner organ. Where are Vaclav’s letters as an inner organ. On the borderlines of my motherland — wet laundry claps in the wind like gunfire. Have you heard of my motherland? My motherland is a raw yolk inside a Fabergé egg. This yolk is what gives gold its color. This face is a fire-receiver. This face is an inner organ. A bone as a key to my people. Where am I from? 11 The golden bones of my motherland are ringing!