From A Sound of Glass Inside Her
a woman we look at her and don’t see anyone don’t know who’s there she says I haven’t looked like myself in all this time she limps and never closes her mouth that’s all we see when we close our eyes to remember her
a man his mother calls him everyday on the stroke of noon he reinvents his days for her because he really doesn’t have anything new to say it’s a lot for him everyday at noon that takes up the rest of his time which is why we medicate him
a woman she moves her head a little she says that it’s Sunday when her sister comes to see her she often puts God in her sentences and the rest it’s all the same to her
a man he looks like a woman but it’s a man we really know under his women’s clothing he also he knows it really deep down he has memories like everybody else but it’s his secret locked up double-tight to confess to someone which will never happen and too bad if we think he’s crazy
a woman actually it’s a girl she is twenty years old she flips through the pages of a fashion magazine at top speed with her fingers as soon as she finishes she starts again and a cassette plays over and over her favorite song full blast at the same time she can’t stop rehearsing the same scene to herself it’s like in the theater but whenever someone shows up she cries
a
man his words remain stuck in his mouth everything comes out all of a
sudden at
once in a state of disorder that’s like pebbles which fall from hail
something
hard out front we don’t always know how to take in we don’t like
grimaces in
general and that man he panics for almost no reason it’s a grimace for
himself
alone
a
man an old guy he’s sure he won’t go traveling anymore that realization
is
plain as the nose on his face his life he’s closed it up boxed it off
the
tomorrows and the next days don’t mean a thing anymore he’d rather
watch the
water of the canal after all in any case he has nothing better to do
besides
watch the water of the canal and whenever a boat passes he turns away
a woman when she walks we understand it’s difficult for her the sacks which are too heavy on her arms she doesn’t want to put them down she says no she refuses over and over if we want to take them for her we don’t insist her feet with each step hesitant to take the next it’s perhaps to stop she would like to stop for good for one last time to quit carrying all these over-heavy sacks to leave off walking to keep going forward she can’t bear it anymore
a woman her name she pronounces as if it were obscene in her mouth there is a whore and a little girl trying to take up the same voice that’s probably why we back up however there’s tenderness in her immobile eyes which are asking for too much she knows and we don’t say anything to her
a man it’s more a monkey we’d take him for seeing him from afar he throws himself round a neck lifts his leg his arms are many feet long we’d say they wind up and his yellow teeth when he hollers this man even close up in our arms looks like a monkey
a man he’s too young for the questions he asks himself he says in my head words have been erased someone confiscated them now I am like an empty shell I don’t know how to fill it’s perhaps pierced this shell he says or too fragile or wasn’t solidly constructed from the start he has hypotheses is looking for explanations so why won’t anybody give him some
The France Issue
Summer 2010