Issue 32: Alix Chauvet
AFTER BAUDELAIRE
Ire
Furadantine, decimating the whole flora,
From Turbine Halle hoists high the iron piss
To the brown sprigs of thrush, slightly leucopenic
And the Aussie attempt rusting in the canal.
On the tweed chemise, at the nipple level
Voltaire in copper gown flutters his amber cane;
He strikes theatrically in aerial puddles
Using the cold-breath prompt of Baron Bardula.
Westertoren recedes, and my smoldering mouth
Accompanies your eclipsed smile of nippon cat,
Despite the snotty gray, your benzoin in my nose,
Suicidal heir to atypical shingles,
The solar ace of clubs and my stung chest of spades
Exchange crumbs and snatches of anorexic love.
Luster
My millennial mind hangs like a chandelier.
A toad-like squat armchair knocked up with verdant debts,
Verses and april rains, earthworms, ravens and slugs,
With some horsehair curling in the midst of a lull,
Lies less convincingly than my reclining skull.
It’s a fancy hotel, a deep cemetery,
That receives socialites on its sterile compost.
—I am an apricot that the tide has thrown up,
In its flesh, hushed taboos imitate the maggots,
Assaulting ruthlessly the so-called cold-hearted.
I am grumpy-dopey trapped in a potpourri,
In which marbles collide amongst phoney bustles,
Where falsified Degas and barbies made of rind,
Get drunk from petulant jasmine emanations.
Nothing equals in pain the never-ending lacks,
When under the deaf snows of countless alibis,
Absence, the trace of the night train rendered invisible,
Echoes all the lost time, its wingspan you deny.
–Your injury’s no more, fleeting tendinitis!
Than a crippled pretext serving as reposoir,
For your memory blown by a pale sirocco.
A caterpillar hangs from the Corsican tree,
Its skeletal motif recalls the depths of things,
The very point at which the moon sets with a blush.
Opprobrium
When the can opener fails to declaw the mind
From the tiger’s striping on a box of frosties,
And that from the ring light, you play some Harold Budd,
My desire yellows in the gray of boredom;
When my sopping saddle brands my ass with a heart,
And that rancid wishes, like Sunday butterflies,
Shyly, with nonchaloir, brush over your shoulders,
And smash their proboscis up against the crass ice;
When my black mascara trickles out sluttily,
Mimicking Alcatraz (your lawyer at the bar),
And that swarms of children teem in my ovaries,
Crocheting and pinning my wedding rêveries,
Suddenly acarids start to resound like ticks,
Jumping from the tightrope to the quadrichrome sky,
Alike ectoplasms on a long transhumance,
Lowing ineffably, in bossa nova style.
–And the tinted teslas, avoiding all traffic,
Roll down the figure-eight of my soul; O Patsy,
Don’t cry, please, for Norwegian suns are electric,
And fray some big black holes deep into your orbits.
Concretion
Just as a kingfisher tumbling through soda straws,
Radiant, but Concorde-like, sharp yet rupestrian,
Which, with its wrestler’s mask, matches red against blue,
I melt like ultrasound over syncretic fangs.
All is charred black for me, the -ceros, the pteros,
The stems of rosemary that perish in Levant.
From the troglodyte depths, the down of a robin
Offsets the ochre pain of dead-end Di Fusco;
The liophilized dawn scorches the agaves,
And the pressed asphodels, for which all is narcos,
Too quickly abandon their stone-washed opinions
To serve as a new skin for my freshly shot love.
The failed cyborg saviour doesn’t have the know-how
To twist l’autre in his lair, otherness dans son antre,
And in terms that are white, thermal and decimal,
Those used by old snobs on their lukewarm flagstones,
He failed at refusing the adagio’s smoked tea
Where instead of milk flows, the suckling counterpart.
Alix Chauvet (Geneva, 1995) is an experimental poet and graphic designer based in Amsterdam.
She investigates the relationship between language and the body through inter- and intralinguistic translations combining French and English. She is currently working on a feminist rewrite of les Fleurs du Mal.
Copyright © 2024 by Alix Chauvet, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author