Category: Ida Börjel

From MA

Ida Börjel in Asymptote

Seen in Asymptote, poems from Ida Börjel’s collection MA, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida:

A
Earth: mother earth
was. Pangaea
was and Gondwana
was broken from Pangaea
from Pangaea        Laurasia

from Pangaea Laurasia
Ma all was broken into pieces
Pangea was
and Gondwana was broken from Pangaea
the universe expands
the conditional
void, locked
in time, twisted in
the human measurement earth’s
loneliness, emptiness, earth’s
abandoned lonely lunacy
time, the human era        the anthropocene

adrenaline, adrenaline was
swirls, swirls
the milky way’s
spiral structure, poisonous swirls were
hamster wheels, the mobius strips’
which happened, it happened and happened
pattern light, bright lattice bright
where eye light fractured into prisms
where the bloodhound
whose eye had burst        insomnia

F

also the cheaters were, the cheaters
 in an opportunistic flood wave, shock wave was
 waves and in the waves wading after
 the anti-information board’s green
or gray censorious praxis tags
 after wet crackers in the head during
 the press conference, paper bullets fired against
 the foreign ministry’s cheating oil deals
 iron ore, profit, fabrications
the fiction that the only thing that was
 was the only possible path through
 deforestation, iron ore
 the arms factory and the shrewdness
 shrewdness was; Operation Paperclip
 the antitank rifle Carl Gustaf in Kashmir
 the anniversary was, anniversaries
 iron ore, the decision mid-summer
 regarding the german soldiers’ safe transit
 across the tracks between the Norwegian
 and Finnish border        Svea

butterflies, butterfly mine
dams were; labyrinthine
echo chamber
 the shivering; the capsules; semi
prone; flood delta the situation
 could be assessed based on their love
 usually they came out to dance and listen
—when we played and no one came 
the soldiers knew that action would follow
the Syrian troop’s human shields
 a fine wreath of children
 clinging to the tanks to not
 be shot into the head
there was, in the factory and the factory
 outside the factory walls
 the profit margin, the human factor
 what had become reasonable in as things stand
full speed ahead, legitimate answers, weak
 levees        Katrina

(…)

 

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