Guests, by Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

strawberry moon
alternate universes
don't stay put

Granny comes out with a wooden spoon. “Try sweet potato instead of white potato,” she announces.
That is the signal that we should stop what we are doing because it's exactly the right time, because to enjoy his sweet potato cake on the terrace, accompanied by sweet potato chips and palm honey.
Obviously the sun disappeared in the meanwhile and pics of Grandma serving the cake are unwatchable. But we go beyond those things because our noses keep us in the present.

panic . . .
a queen bee tied
to her chin 

Three Poems by Stephen Bett

A.S. Byatt, Possession (opening lines)

 

The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing…. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.

 

 

Book me a passage —     bowed by age

I’m on board with creaking

 

My spine missing

 

Treat myself for mal du doute

 

Let them eat bandages (caked in blood

 

I have bad images

 

Dirt white trash ever’where, cult-like

buzzing imagined seventh function

 

Tape their noise, tie ’em up

sure aint neat freaks

 

A-boot & a-boot —    eh, flyboys

 

Mine in-jokes galore, archival,

whoopie who cares?

 

Y are we at this?

These B’s, mistreated herein,

in a bow…   done

 

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller (trans, William Weaver)

 

Opening lines: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

Closing line: And you say, “Just a moment. I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino.”

 

 

Relax  ·  Concentrate  ·  Dispel  ·  Fade

expect grapheme greyscale a’gen

 

Night-light on in ever’more boffo buff

Self-Portrait …   convex mirror’d

Razor-file frame fame

(hold by careful hand, pls)

 

Cultish wish        In a good trouble way

Dish it up

 

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid

 

And you say, “Just a moment. I’m almost finished

a fabulist attempt on Italo Calvino’s shelf life.” [1]

 

 

Albert Camus, The Outsider (trans, Joseph Laredo)

 

From the depths of my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I’d been leading, I’d felt a vague breath drifting towards me across all the years that were still to come, and on its way this breath had evened out everything that was then being proposed to me in the equally unreal years I was living through.

 

 

Ohh, that slow dancer Meursault

jigging a painful five step

 

This well timed Primer —   a “how to” zig’n

zag that ol’ existential standard

 

Bourgie bunk foisted (not proposed)

& a dark wind to level it out

 

No goal-keeping sigh fated (feted?)

between the sticks

 

So a ballsier translation sits best

 

Or this, from our bullish first-year files —

 

He killed the man, not with anger or hatred

but simply with a gun. [2]

 

 

[1] John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

[2] Stuart Gilbert’s translation (unavailable here at the moment) is more sharply pointed than Joseph Laredo’s; Camus was a decent amateur football goal-keeper; another favourite quote from the 1^st year student essay files deserves a mention: “Unless he is obeyed his uncle or his aunt mechanically, it just seems the pork chop and is ugly.” (Sass ’n Pass, p. 67)

 

to your scattered bodies go, by Mark Young

 

to your scattered bodies go   Mark Young