TRANSLATOR’S NOTE, or, BECAUSE I WORRY THAT ANY PROFESSION OF DEDICATION WITHOUT SOME HESITATION MAY ULTIMATELY BE JUST ONE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM VANISHING

Valerie Hsiung



you see the trees

you know there are trees

you speak the word of trees

in a colonial language, aloud, to yourself

*

the woman has several holes

hollowed out of her body

into one of them water is filled and the hole is declared east lake

mao swims there famously

out of another an orange is plucked

this orange will be the last 

orange for many generations

navel sweet! my puberty! sixteen blowjobs in the wind! 

the woman with a remarkable sense of humor

rolls the orange down a drop leaf table that smells like techno-utopia

sucking out the sigil of a bloated cream colored night orange is sliced in half by a sword and i return to the bosom of my appearance as an anthropological cameo

*

the hole is covered now with gathered materials

materials i’ve words for but never gathered myself

some of them are artificers some of them are manufacturers

others are food bloggers big in asia 

this card is the card of the race to the bottom

*

and i love the words which came out of your sharpening pain

and i love the words which came out of you when you were on the edge of a clarity so shattering there was nothing left to fear

*

the trees wear their blindfolds now

the faucets under dresses run down with the waste of 

duress now into the only river in a city whose streets we had the ignorance to blamelessly walk through once

*

setting pigeon waste aside

to reflect sunlight off of foil

placing pigeons on the edge of a woven floorcloth whose edges are turning and curling outward

to flatten them back down

*

north north west south south east

the heroic couplets

*

mannequins bluffing and buffering

*

foil covering a body outside in the grass

not quite mannequienne

*

semi conductor

semi conductor

*

excusez-moi savez vous où peut-on trouver…

*

from far away

the price of homes falls

as does your desire to live anywhere 

else 

encroach

*

let us follow the boy who follows the pigeon who follows the crumbs left by the invisible woman 

walking around the factory which was open and in operation 24 hours a day

until yesterday

*

tell me the story of the one who lived before and after cartoons

tell me the story of the piece of furniture and the wallpaper and the room for study

tell me the phrase “pins and needles” can be applied non-medically

and is a good thing

*

in this pas de deux 

should we utilize all of the above costumes or only a certain subset of the aforementioned bound feet? 

*

order of lemons

counterfeit lemons

*

our thesis: one caliginous hole, vaginal, central bureau

messianic monocle

*

lay the boy who’s been overfed

onto the pile of needles

walk down the hallway 

acupuncture greenward dressed

with twin ormolus

*

lingerie store opened and shuttered

in an ancient town

a suitcase full with smuggled silken things 

why when we think of lingerie does the mind also conjure up lemon trees? 

*

one long white hair

in the head of some black haired twenty something 

straight away 

all the trees horizontally

parallel to terra firma

*

one long white hair

like a piece of floss

tangled up in a tree in the french quarter

tie the knot

behind the mascot

*

longing for some sign

of oblique singularity

like one thousand year old egg

balanced perfectly

versus one raw egg

wobbling aimlessly

i found my omen in a chest of good fortune

in the dead of night the chest scraped through the streets of an ancient town and the people very dopily serenely heard nothing at all

into terra incognita basket was woven 

*

without apparatchik

a woman exposed divided in half

one side wires and cords

another side flesh

a fauteuil armchair divided in half

one side its naked wood exposed

the other side fully upholstered

*

you watch

we watch

they watch

the sky pedaling forth but with no forward motion

out there

what did descartes actually know 

of smog and froth?