Anna De Vaul

Issue 17

2 POEMS

Universe II

The retreat of the Little Sisters

completes the cycle. It’s not rational

 

but something in its texture hints

at the heredity of rolled banknotes.

In the House of Anonymity,

 

a calm voiceover skinning mangoes

of high-flown rhetoric. The letter

 

13, the female voice, excessive.

The priest by comparison is

heavily bearded, a scalpel

 

leaping of its own accord.

The reflection implicates – us,

 

distorted in this realm of oysters

and lemons. The young girl

and the spectacle, in the dictatorship

 

of mouth and lungs. Hear

me now. There is no grace,

 

no second house forgotten, plotted

in the verdant shade of nuclear plants.

There is only the promise

 

of the skeleton, double-agent

of molecules uniting us all.


 

Elementary Class Consciousness

We eat the organs

of animals, plot utopia

with the jam knife.

 

We break three teeth

on the pure exteriority

of imperfect semiotic “things”,

 

believe in beauty’s

untiring whisper, idioms

of labor systems and acrobats

 

of desire. We unbalance

the peep-show, anticipate

this affair of sitting,

 

sass at the clearing

of our hosts’ moralities.

 


“Universe II” Sources: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Ernest Cline’s Armada, Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler’s Subcritical Texts, Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl

‘Elementary Class Consciousness” Sources: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler’s Subcritical Texts, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl


Anna De Vaul‘s prose and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals. Her chapbook Cosmonaut is forthcoming from Valley Press (UK) and her first collection is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press (US).


Photo by Viktor Kiryanov