Arielle Guy reads Wisława Szymborska.
Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life.
ARIELLE GUY reads her own poem here. She really wants to have a dog. She would have two huskies named Mulder and Scully. Her work has never been published on other planets and she holds out hope. Her work has appeared on earth in Eleven Eleven, EOAGH, 6x6, kadar koli, CARVE, delirious hem and other magazines. Her first full-length collection, Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid’s Grimoire, was published by Dusie Press in 2011, as well as a chapbook, Gothenburg, from ypolita press, and other Dusie chapbooks. She has a book forthcoming from Lark Books, Dreamographers of the Eastern Seaboard, part-memoir, part-essay, about mindfulness, writing, heritage, and being at peace. She lives in Brooklyn for the time being, maybe forever.
(click image for audio)
ARIELLE GUY
Exile
But I am (but I am)
washed in forest:
in the sin of Atom;
Adam’s
post-apocalypse
we all swam in acid
toasted marshmallows by the sea
side-stepped, goose-
stepped the Majesty
of hope.
by my brilliant deductions,
our worlds should have ended
long ago
we’re still here
hold on
knuckles whitening
against stone
reddening as the rocks
rip our skin
our skin
our kin
levitators of Beauty;
all masks
All Saints
the Fallen congregate
around the Burned:;
syntax is lost
language is lost
prayer is lost
we are all dead
we are all dead
we are all dead
we are all dead
but wait! an earth-covered,
worm-tasseled hand
breaks through the boundary
of earth between life and death
and lives again;
the whole body, dirt-covered,
emerges from a rain-soaked grave
in early winter.
the snows haven’t come yet,
deep winter cold
hasn’t frozen the ground,
forbidding the dead to be buried there.
The sky doesn’t touch
pussy, justice,
Lord, God,
grave, my sodden,
my heart’s armor
of ribs; they protect like
a Claddagh ring,
like the sky,
opening to the moor,
to the outback,
to the tundra.
No one flourishes in infertile ground.
We’re same as green--salt the land and nothing grows.
