HORIZON FOR THE BLIND

-translated from the French by Léon Pradeau

Beelzebub
Spotted peacock’s
Twinned erections
Dire ejaculations
Sticking your penis in the sunset train
In the axis, strangleheld
Family
Inside me glows a painful seed
A cry gushes in wreaths
You come

I love the summer the dust the risky wheat
Of deserts
Plowed by western winds and the geometric Bedouin
On his donkey
Waking up
Horrors recoil in anxious breaths
The sun setting ever
behind the cliffs
and their nuggetless
dentition
On a wicker-circled brainy ammonoid
On the day you end up emptying your loins
In another girl’s throat

Yes I’m jealous
Solitude is rough-handed and she smells like a corpse
Neglected sand adrift toward a sigh
Night digs a hole
Deep into the dead end we call the pain of others
And the bone of my bones
The lefty shadow of my love
Desire void of tenderness or verb
My night my very life
Drips
Between my fingers
Between my thighs
Under the sheets
And the bed
Better spread your butter on the sad cobbles
Of the lattice
Than spin around his sex
O Eternal top
And its splayed orbs of gentle lace
Its wandering spirals

A man waits
For me downstairs
I’m sliding slick and soapy
Between rows of palm trees
And layers of dead women
Toward his mouth that has my sex swaggering
Crackles grinds its teeth and sizzles
Under my feet a lenient floe
Improvises
He sleeps in the cold foods compartment
The door is sealed
The rug climbs along the walls
Behind the windscreen a well-rounded snout
Whispers let yourself go
No one is normal in the dreams of others
Like a stain of ink in a juvenile palm
Without losing a few teeth
O stunted eyes of a submissive child
Gnashes cracks steamy kisses
Stains of grease on the yeast of a venomous
Wafer
Comedies fake outings and elastic nipples
A few jabs on the fingers of religion as she sits
A few tombs under roving sand
Even the usherettes wear masks at the communal grave
How can you accompany this rattle chord gone rogue
If you’re not screaming

I’m hungry
Am I ready to gobble up this blunted tool
Am I ready to swallow this bland chlorophyll
Am I ready to tear down this green hand
This pillar this palm this bristle this legend
Without letting mud spurt between my stretched toes

A man waits for me in the silent dark
Of his grave
An oyster floats in his flabby hat
His penis left dressed as a snail
If you’re trying to escape it’s not enough to just raise your eyes
As a girl I slept naked
Naked like Jericho
Once
Its walls
GRAVES
Which phallus gets to ring the knell
On the day I’ll fall asleep under a leaded lid
Melting in my fear
Like an olive in its jar
It’ll be cold metallic and gross
I’ll no longer have sex in enameled bathtubs
I’ll no longer have sex between parentheses
Or between the Javanese lips of lawns in spring
I’ll exude death like the dampness of love
Cornered assaulted by October visions
I’ll snuggle in the mud
Oh the suckers have returned
Haunting and stale like neurotic nostrils
Crouching on my chest
They pull up their pale skirts
And here flies their cervical discharge
Sloppy remembrances and hostile elephants
This tomb stoned night speaks of too many nights
Now
Who knows what the dead are worth

I hunger for your smell
More powerful than furnace oil tamer of great waves
How many foot soldiers thought they could swim
And choked under the velvet of its greasy bearings
How many women have perished under his armpits
Even the dead are still chanting and sucking
Their tongues bending like falsetto
And I too am brooding
All of my mental beaches
Are plagued
Oil sands
All of the dreams, Berakhot says,
End up punctured in the mouth
Of the reader
Ahead of me, wild grass
Behind and inside Now it has come to this
Gushes from my throat in convulsive sputters
And in the clearing with a swirl of dead trees
Two skinny ghosts are pulling each other’s hair
My brother my cousin my lover or perhaps
The man I am between the lines

Poetry
I hunger for your flesh
Sowing seeds of bister poppy
Of lymph and fissures
Weary Anger alone curls up your sex
There are truths you’d want to curse

Rain’s honest drum halted just now
Tomorrow’s rolling back its holly cape
I wait I wait I wait
For your coming your key your mouth your lips
Your needle your alibi
Your penis vacuuming
Yours sores your hours
For women hell takes root in the body
And ends up barefaced
At the morgue

Joyce Mansour was an Egyptian-French poet. Her works include Birds of Prey, The Damnations, Phallus and Mummy, and others. She died in 1986.

Léon Pradeau is a poet, editor, and translator. He lives between Paris and Chicago. He runs Transat’, a journal of transatlantic poetry and poetics; and Sardines & Marmelade, a collection of explicit chapbooks. snow of snow, a chapbook with Bottlecap Press, just came out; a first full-length book of poems, Vaisseau Instantané / Instant Shipping, is forthcoming with Les Murmurations in 2024.