3:AM Magazine

By Ruxandra Novac.

 

ecograffiti. pedagogical poems. flags on towers (excerpt)

and your gestures are sweat and your words –
solid blood And
they work with them
                                bearings, spark plugs, screws
without knowing they’re crocheting your life
                                        out of the neon lights of the city
          a wedding – corrugated and grotesque
But I know everything I’ve seen
how they unbury their dead every morning
from the red latrines of the city
and kiss them on the mouth
          with the wonder of the little girl who opens up a doll
          and sees its liver, its heart, its kidneys
          Because I live here
in the centre of the disaster
and I’ve seen
I, antonin artaud,
my father and mother
and I myself

 

like a small fence, like metallic lace (excerpt)

Bucharest opens like a huge syphilitic flower
and I know that nothing, nothing can any longer prevent the disaster
of the rags of my twenty three year old mind
Neither the holiness of Tanger, nor the narcosis, nor the butterflies
groping their way in slaughterhouses, terrifying the workers.
None of all these
Neither the training, nor the small churches, nor the sex of the city
raping the night
nothing

Only the silence of a drowned dog
floating down the river, in the sun

in my body there is a place where they come on motorbikes and a place
to attract insects and in
the left arm – a place to carry out sacrifices
the skin explodes sometimes like in a city
a bomb after war – and then they come
and camouflage the places with wool and –
because I wanted to learn sometimes
they do it wrong and use something else – sometimes artificial
snow and – because I wanted to
learn they brought my pills and I swallowed them and
slowly they all mixed up inside me

and behave yourself
and behave yourself
don’t torture people and animals

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruxandra Novac was born in 1980, studied at the University of Bucharest and has released two collections of poetry. She will be reading, along with Elena Vladareanu and Adrian Urmanov, as part of the inaugural Maintenant reading series next month in London.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, April 25th, 2010.