Hannibal Poems

by Trevor Taylor

by Margaret Atwood

your back is rough all over like a cat’s tongue / I stroke you lightly and you shiver

you clench yourself, withhold even your flesh outline / pleasure is what you take but will not accept.

believe me, allow me to touch you gently, it may be the last

time / your closed eyes beat against my fingers I slip my hand down your neck, rest on the pulse

you pull away

by Thomas Lux

for Cecilia

by Edward Hirsch

(Inferno, Canto Five)

When you read Canto Five aloud last night in your naked, sing-song, fractured Italian, my sweet compulsion, my carnal appetite,

I suspected we shall never be forgiven for devouring each other body and soul, and someday Minos, a connoisseur of sin,

will snarl himself twice around his tail to sentence us to life in perpetual motion, funneling us downward to the second circle

where we will never sleep or rest again in turbulent air, like other ill-begotten lovers who embraced passion beyond reason,

by Barbara Greenberg

The knife accuses the wound: See how I bleed, to which the wound replies: We bleed as one. That’s how it was between us, between her and me

when one of us was the cloth and one the needle; one the teeth, the other one the tongue. Knife to wound: See how I bleed.

Bough to cradle: You tore me from the tree. Cradle to broken bough: You let me down. That’s how it was between us, between her and me

when the wind shifted from the south to the northeast and stone by stone her house fell into ruin. The knife accuses the wound: See how I bleed,

and the needle the cloth, the tongue the teeth, and cradle and bough one another in lieu of the wind. That’s how it was between us, between her and me,

by Anne Barrows

Recipe number 1935.— Fig Peckers. These birds are not met with in American markets; it is therefore useless to give the recipes concerning them. I will only say that they may be prepared like larks. — Escoffier

this plate of fois gras garnished with purple and shining

open figs this rose-perfumed rice do you think I am unaware you require? under a veil of steam

of what a succulent pear & blue-veined cheese— a bone-handled knife

I know you believe yourself safe & invisible— oh, and the liquors flavored with plums

honey & almonds, wild cherries brilliant in firelight but you are translucent with hunger—

I dip my fingers again and again into the brim-full bowl staining them red

like thin glass what do you endlessly want? like pomegranate seeds

by Jane Hirshfield

Under a thin coat of dust dull globes of pomegranates ripen.

No easy fruit, these sweet-seeded leatherskinned puckering moons that clench & pull the brushwood closer to ground—

Wild branches interweave into a thickening idiom of wood:

muttered polysyllabic of twig, guttural patois of leaf in a green-belled dusk, and the vowels, slurred, hanging in drunken heat.


by Sara Tantlinger

Tell me all the terrible things you did so I can love you more so I can want you with clarity, no boundaries allowed.

I want to have you with carnage on my hands, poison on my lips, bruises on your neck, thighs, wrists from my love like butchery, kisses that slaughter, eyes that consume.

Tell me how we will murder each other at the end of this affair, how love is killed because we were too raw, because we loved too bloody. I sharpen my knife. You sharpen yours.

by Christopher Bursk

by Giuseppe Ungaretti


        Cima Quattro il 23 dicembre 1915

Un’intera nottata buttato vicino a un compagno massacrato con la sua bocca digrignata volta al plenilunio con la congestione delle sue mani penetrata nel mio silenzio ho scritto lettere piene d’amore

Non sono mai stato tanto attaccato alla vita

Watch

translated by Allen Mandelbaum


        Cima Quattro, December 23, 1915

One whole night thrust down beside a slaughtered comrade his snarling mouth turned to the full moon the bloating of his hands entering my silence I have written letters full of love

by Rosario Castellanos

No puedo hablar sino de lo que sé.

Como Tomás tengo la mano hundida en una llaga. Y duele en el otro y en mí.

¡Ah, qué sudor helado de agonía! ¡Qué convulsión de asco!

No, no quiero consuelo, ni olvido, ni esperanza.

Quiero valor para permanecer, para no traicionar lo nuestro: el día presente y esta luz con que se mira entero.

Livid Light

translated by Magda Bogin

I can only speak of what I know.

Like Thomas my hand is deep inside a wound. And it hurts both the other and myself.

Cold sweat of agony! Convulsion of nausea!

No, I don't want comfort or oblivion or hope.

by Rosario Castellanos

Porque éramos amigos y, a ratos, nos amábamos; quizá para añadir otro interés a los muchos que ya nos obligaban decidimos jugar juegos de inteligencia. Pusimos un tablero enfrente de nosotros: equitativo en piezas, en valores, en posibilidad de movimientos. Aprendimos las reglas, les juramos respeto y empezó la partida. Henos aquí hace un siglo, sentados, meditando encarnizadamente cómo dar el zarpazo último que aniquile de modo inapelable y, para siempre, al otro.

Chess

translated by Magda Bogin

by Rosario Castellanos

Matamos lo que amamos. Lo demás no ha estado vivo nunca. Ninguno está tan cerca. A ningún otro hiere un olvido, una ausencia, a veces menos. Matamos lo que amamos. ¡Que cese ya esta asfixia de respirar con un pulmón ajeno! El aire no es bastante para los dos. Y no basta la tierra para los cuerpos juntos y la ración de la esperanza es poca y el dolor no se puede compartir.

El hombre es animal de soledades, ciervo con una flecha en el ijar que huye y se desangra.

Ah, pero el odio, su fijeza insomne de pupilas de vidrio; su actitud que es a la vez reposo y amenaza.

El ciervo va a beber y en el agua aparece el reflejo de un tigre.

El ciervo bebe el agua y la imagen. Se vuelve — antes que lo devoren— (cómplice, fascinado) igual a su enemigo.

Damos la vida sólo a lo que odiamos.

Destiny

translated by Magda Bogin

We kill what we love. What’s left was never alive. No one else is so close. What is forgotten, what is absent or less, hurts no one else. We kill what we love. Enough of drawing a choked breath through someone else’s lung! There is not air enough for both of us. And the earth will not hold both our bodies and our ration of hope is small and pain cannot be shared.

Man is an animal of solitudes, a deer that bleeds as it flees with an arrow in its side.

Ah, but hatred with its insomniac glass eyes; its attitude of menace and repose.

The deer goes to drink and a tiger is reflected in the water.

The deer drinks the water and the image. And becomes — before he is devoured— (accomplice, fascinated) his enemy.

by Rosario Castellanos

¿Por qué decir nombres de dioses, astros, espumas de un océano invisible, polen de los jardines más remotos? Si nos duele la vida, si cada día llega desgarrando la entraña, si cada noche cae convulsa, asesinada. Si nos duele el dolor en alguien, en un hombre al que no conocemos, pero está presente a todas horas y es la víctima y el enemigo y el amor y todo lo que nos falta para ser enteros. Nunca digas que es tuya la tiniebla, no te bebas de un sorbo la alegría. Mira a tu alrededor: hay otro, siempre hay otro. Lo que él respira es lo que a ti te asfixia, lo que come es tu hambre. Muere con la mitad más pura de tu muerte.

The Other

translated by Magda Bogin

by Rosanna Warren

by Margaret Atwood

I

I, the performer in the tense arena, glittered under the fluorescent moon. Was bent masked by the table. Saw what focused my intent: the emptiness

The air filled with an ether of cheers.

My wrist extended a scalpel.

II

The table is a flat void, barren as total freedom. Though behold

A sharp twist like taking a jar top off

and it is a living skeleton, mine, round, that lies on the plate before me

red as a pomegranate, every cell a hot light.

III

I circle, confront my opponent. The thing

refuses to be shaped, it moves like yeast. I thrust,

the thing fights back. It dissolves, growls, grows crude claws;

The air is dusty with blood.

It springs. I cut with delicate precision.

The specimens ranged on the shelves, applaud.

The thing falls Thud. A cat anatomized.

O secret form of the heart, now I have you.

IV

Now I shall ornament you. What would you like?

Baroque scrolls on your ankles? A silver navel?

I am the universal weaver; I have eight fingers.

I complicate you; I surround you with intricate ropes.

What web shall I wrap you in? Gradually I pin you down.

What caution shall I carve and seal in your skull?

What size will I make you? Where should I put your eyes?

V

I was insane with skill: I made you perfect.

I should have chosen instead to curl you small as a seed,

trusted beginnings. Now I wince before this plateful of results:

core and rind, the flesh between already turning rotten.

I stand in the presence of the destroyed god:

a rubble of tendons, knuckles and raw sinews.

Knowing that the work is mine how can I love you?

These archives of potential time exude fear like a smell.

VI

You arise, larval and shrouded in the flesh I gave you;

I, who have no covering left but a white cloth skin

escape from you. You are red, you are human and distorted.

You have been starved, you are hungry. I have nothing to feed you.

I pull around me, running, a cape of rain.

What was my ravenous motive? Why did I make you?

VII

Reflection, you have stolen everything you needed:

my joy, my ability to suffer.

You have transmuted yourself to me: I am a vestige, I am numb.

Now you accuse me of murder.

Can’t you see I am incapable?

Blood of my brain, it is you who have killed these people.

VIII

Since I dared to attempt impious wonders

I must pursue that animal I once denied was mine.

Over this vacant winter plain, the sky is a black shell; I move within it, a cold kernel of pain.

I scratch huge rescue messages on the solid snow; in vain. My heart’s husk is a stomach. I am its food.

IX

The sparkling monster gambols there ahead, his mane electric: This is his true place.

He dances in spirals on the ice, his clawed feet kindling shaggy fires.

His happiness is now the chase itself: he traces it in light, his paths contain it.

I am the gaunt hunter necessary for his patterns, lurking, gnawing leather.

X

The creature, his arctic hackles bristling, spreads over the dark ceiling, his paws on the horizons, rolling the world like a snowball.

He glows and says:

Doctor, my shadow shivering on the table, you dangle on the leash of your own longing; your need grows teeth.

You sliced me loose

and said it was Creation. I could feel the knife. Now you would like to heal that chasm in your side, but I recede. I prowl.