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    [FRAME TEXT 1]

         Children of this century, avert your gaze.

         Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage. Foreseeing nothing, the wayward herds of our actions race toward the toxic wells of their own garish reflections.

         Children of this century, the landscapes are all pierced through with the holes of our sovereign absence.

     

    “THE NECKLACE OF LIPS…”

         I was a crisp winter, clear and naked, a winter of laundered underwear, of very hard candies, of colors carved with a pocketknife. I laughed sometimes, gravel under my knees. The steam jungle continually retraced itself on the windowpanes of expectation. Great panicked encampments on the steppes in the sheets. The voracity of tiny teeth crystallizing forbidden milk. And the half-hearted, unholy hideouts between the cricked necks of laughter. Oh! My rumpled paper dresses. Incestuous swaying of hammocks. The universe was swelling under my floral-print blinders. Childish crawling in a wicker casket that was carried away with the current, while with cannibal self-assurance I crouched down on the violet banks of the horizon.

     

    “…IN THE JAWS OF SILENCE…”

    Sheathed in fragility and self-importance, we penetrate
          our exterior selves.
    At the core of the wind, the roots of the heart.

                     Famine
                     Tremors
                     Manifest

    The ground is haughty
    The leaves fall in fits
    Torrents of shadows snap the air’s spine
    And the gates of silence are running for it.

     

    [FRAME TEXT 2]

          So?
          We must learn to contemplate the fractured horizon of anamorphic memory with more detachment.
          Though resistant, the muscles of words are only small heaps of chopped meat, upon which silence’s cats gorge themselves in the night, until the driveling lips of the deferred morning.
          Children of this century, which part-for-the-whole could you hope to gain in these arenas, eye-spotted with dubious lighting?

     

    “…AND THE BITE OF SIGNS…”

          Exactly halfway through the lunar trapezium, a knot
    of dark paths leapt at my throat.

    […]

    G      THAT OF SOURCES
               WITHOUT MOUTHS:

    Chessboard distorted by pros and cons
    A pit in parallel where no one ever meets
    The shrewd ostentation of a ram skin raft
    An imitation of the sky in a dressing gown
    With articulated feet and hands
    To crack open the void
    And its ventilated workshops
    Foolish but without frenzy
    So many orthopedic tricks
    Preparing to scale the walls of metaphysics

     

    [FRAME TEXT 3]

              I told you:
              All art amounts to eternal delay.

     

    “LOST BETWEEN FLESH AND LANGUAGE…”

    Backing away from misery
    Toward a current of green indecency
    Incisive
    Raw
    Shameless
    Budding at the tips
    Of our moving branches
    Wolves bears eagles are all very well
    But you bring me back into the tale
    Into the thicket of your movements
    No beggar concealing his nerves within
    A little peat bag against his skin
    No witch faking modesty, head
         cocked like a bitter fruit
    Ahead of atmospheric evasions
    The blinding touch of the elements
    The ambivalent changing of poles
    The cheerful evaporation of gravity
    As armor
    The mere blond of ryegrass
    Along the fragile walls of the heart
    Scarecrow burning for slow-motion excess

     

    [FRAME TEXT 4]

           Children of this century, the luminous spasms of the lighthouse
    Have fired quite enough on our sidelong nights.

     

    “…THE FUTURE ON REPEAT…”

    Within each line of verse, a sneering obsession with the
           following:
    Meaning creeps
    Beneath the seasons, battered
    By a great gastropodan battering ram

                                                           7TH BLOW
               Insidious
               Terrible
               Ceremonious
               We start all over
               But this time with spineless finesse
               All holds still
               While knotting peelings
               There are bricks of misery
               Stacked up in the vaults of the air
               From a transfer of funds to the other
               Words seep
               Through organ pipes of hydrophilic cotton
               We hide away and keep quiet
               In the hollow of a loud-speaker
               The void rearranges its cravings
               With a debauchery of deficient memories
               Pregnant by blows from a lightning rod
               Sleep’s cisterns put maimed typewriters to bed
               We love in small doses
               Salivating profusely
               The reptilian crawl of freedom
               Interests
               The little metronome-men
               Perched on pebbles of blood

     

    [FRAME TEXT 5]

                                    A sack race, two thousand years long
                                    What an unforgettable show!

     

    [FINAL FRAME TEXT]

           Children of this century, the horizon’s contour is just one of your eyelashes, fallen unwittingly upon the speed bump of space. The time for pulling up the nets of perspective is passed. Violence is at a loss before the prism of abolished distances. Our doubles return in torrents, swelling into balls of excess until they hit the center of gravity of the dark. No point in insisting, there are no more shadow-bearing landscapes, only a rising tide of signs that seek to plunge to the depths of our pupils.

           Children of this century, transparency has gone underground.

     

    Annie Le Brun was born in Rennes in 1942. A poet, essayist, and literary critic, she was a participant in the Surrealist movement until the group disbanded in 1969. Known for her critique of certain moralistic feminisms and her insistence on absolute freedom of expression, Le Brun has published prolifically since 1967. In addition to her seven works of poetry, she has written extensively on Surrealist poetics, Romanticism, and the Marquis de Sade.

    Alicen Weida is a PhD student in French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where she is also pursuing certificates in Translation Theory and Women’s & Gender Studies. She has been a Graduate Teaching Fellow and lecturer at Baruch College since 2016. Her research interests include translation studies, twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, magical realism, and the aesthetics of globalization. She is currently working on two translations of as-yet-unpublished works by the French writer Marie NDiaye.

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