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    August 2

    We saw the rats and now we’re on a first-name basis. Both the head and beard have an air of red on a background of air. Someone gets up, fists on the table, and that’s that, in itself. The poem in shorthand jotted quickly, with tenderness. Close-up of face when singing. Spasms in a forest of forms. Here we invent a tarpaulin to cover over. The fear to see reappear. The fist in progressive approach. I’m only repeating: the umbrellas whose shadow falls on the mass of people on the bridge and the black net. I live in this world.



    August 3

    We’re on a first-name basis, coming from a more delicate, intimate place, but who are we? Are we able to see the face hanging from the objective more precisely? And when they unload the vitals we count the images, the way they appear to us, in their brevity, more than ever held in close correspondence. I won’t change anything about you. She says: an hourglass was the saddest thing he had given me to see. Everyone says: hourglasses are the saddest things. I’m only repeating. This precise instant.



    August 4

    She climbs, an overfilled box in her arms. Within an impulse that doesn’t want to begin. If you read this. It’s not a coincidence that a few evasive lines erase themselves. If you’re still reading. Right now, nothing seems as vast as the box she carries. One single element floats. The heart, fettered by doubt. She’s confounded in a moment of shame. Shores, storms, the scream carried out. Voilà, she says, the universe. The wave. It’s her weakness. She documents everything she says.



    August 5

    There’s gesture as an opportunity to be reborn. In the middle of the tumult and city haze, accumulated bodies. We saw hands with blood on them. We were smoke in the night. We examine something red under our nails. We forget the moment. We dance on the bridge when no one’s looking. There are fugitives on the water. We’re fugitives. It’s like a theater of wax. I feel older than the group of older women. With a fake beard we’ll have some sun in November. To illuminate the sky the town’s electricity must be cut. It won’t happen overnight. A hand smacks the rim of what I don’t say. I repeat myself. Only for the sake of accuracy.

    Marie de Quatrebarbes, translated by Aiden Farrell. From The Vitals (New York: World Poetry Books, 2025).

     

    Marie de Quatrebarbes is the author of several books of poetry, as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, and the recipient of the 2020 Paul-Verlaine Prize from the Academie Française. She published La tête et les cornes, a poetry and translation review, republished the complete poems of Michel Couturier (L’ablatif absolu, La tête et les cornes), and edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women (Madame tout le monde, Le Corridor bleu). Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti. She lives and works in Paris.

    Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. He has published two chapbooks, lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence), and his poetry and translations have been featured in Amygdala, Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, Asphalte Magazine, Shit Wonder, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Futurepoem and co-curates the Unnamed Reading Series with Ryan Cook. Born in Paris and raised between three continents, Aiden lives in Brooklyn. The Vitals is his debut translation.

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