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Poems

Three Poems

By E.C. Belli ·

The Peppershakers Were Filled to the Brim with Hosts of Swallows

They were very hard to close
The colossal sun in the rearview was a heartthrob
Dogs barking in the nighttime were torrid memories of the moon
And the people were all just wonderful
But something sat in the blood
Aged poorly
Left us like old skies
There was a gray hair
And then there was another

 

After Us

After Pierre Peuchmaurd

Followed by a wilderness
Followed by someone stepping out
Naked, closing off a dream
Followed by waking at morning
With icy feet
Followed by mouths
Glued like the nighttime
To our limbs
(I don’t remember much)
Followed by a great sadness
By something terribly ordinary
By fog
By little children
Flopping out of embrace
(about that night)
(I don’t)
Followed by sleep
Followed by the slow speech of fervor
(remember why I first spoke)
(or where we went next)
Followed by their two small feet
Followed by love sometimes beaten,
Hands tied,
Eyes begging
Followed by a life and a half
Left behind
(I do)
(remember things such as)
Followed by a sharp sound
Followed by monsoon rains
And menial illnesses
Followed and followed
(when you wouldn’t speak)
(to me)
(because)
(I)
Followed by the long world
Its quietly dismembered dead
Followed by a mall shooting
Followed by their eyes
Gouged out
(had forgotten to let you read)
(quietly quietly)
(in the muttering dark)

 

Death Toll

It was never just a tremor
that night
               like a field on fire
and it was never
a question
of who returns
the love
to you, love is always
              a victim
and an accused
why see it in such bold colors
why can’t there
just be
two victims
the way
it actually is
                   simple as
one            two

______________

Photo by Sam Ross

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E.C. Belli

E.C. Belli is a bilingual writer and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Antioch Review, and Caketrain, among others. The Nothing Bird, a selected volume of her translations of French poet Pierre Peuchmaurd, appeared with Oberlin College Press (2013), and her translation of Emmanuelle Guattari’s short novel I, Little Asylum was recently released by Semiotext(e) as part of an exhibit for the Whitney Museum’s 2014 Biennial. She is an editor at Argos Books.

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We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

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