Tradutore, Traditore
We’re poring over her poems together
when she rises to get more cigarettes.
It’s about time: I lean back and stretch,
the blood reuniting with the body,
then slowly turn back to the page.
There’s an e out of place, now fixed,
a lost adverb I must have missed earlier.
I yawn, decide not to mention it: at times
it feels as though she’s trying on this language
for the first time, wearing it shyly like she would
a new lover, and I don’t want to discourage her,
especially not from writing poems
like the one lurking on the page before me:
lanes of blood run down its alleys;
glitter and grease limn its doorsteps.
It feels like the dream of an animal
the evening before its next hunt—
if I’m not careful I’ll slip, fall, not wake up.
Suddenly she’s back. Asks me
what these doodles are I’ve been making,
takes the pen and adds her own, and now
the page is covered in a dark and ancient poetry.
Are we finished for the night? she asks,
her voice rising to the ceiling like lampblack,
a word I’ve always loved but never needed.
Benjamin Morris is a native of Mississippi but currently lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a graduate student in archaeology.