Someone acts on orders, and: The swimmer, lingual side

Someone acts on orders, and: The swimmer, lingual side Linda Maria Baros (bio) translated from the French by Emily Graham Someone acts on orders Someone wears a mask, acts on orders, screams in the streets. Keeps quiet. And where I go, my flesh burns, behind me opens up the earth. The apartment blocks recognize me, step aside, their lights embrace. Enemies sing, are at each other's throats. Where I go, bosses dupe, snatchers dawdle, swindlers think of jail and mess tin.Middlemen hang, exfoliated, from ropes, boys howl before the pumps, hose each other with gasoline, laugh.From the high roofs, slender girls learn to fly, once more, through friction, setting fire to the sadness of the walls, the sidewalks that already invaded the city like magma. Where I arrive, fortunetellers have gone before me.At the crossroads, protective barriers, the canine unit. Upstairs, the silent partners dispersing the group of ushers and peddlers like a handful of sand, just enough for them to wave picket signs, loudspeakers, balaclavas, just enough for the signs to fade. The bikers—the brave organ donors— scream at the top of their lungs, slash their arms.Others sealed over the streets. Scalpers stoop, caught in the machine, under the membrane of fog; those who wash corpses wait, saddened, on the steps, they pick up cigarette butts next to those who wash épaulettes.And all around flutter dead birds who surveil you [End Page 27] with their indifferent, glassy eyes. Where I should burn myself alive this evening, there is a sea of flags, taking up spaces, streets, railway stations.As if the entire city had shit on the immense LCD screens that loop the advert of our arrival. And then the earth starts to tremble … [End Page 28] The swimmer, lingual side At times, a slender swimmer of summer hits the night, famished, at your door.Greenish flames escape from the mouth that she hides between her thighs. You make her sit and you nourish her. But she is sadder than the hunted panthers in other affairs and begs your tongue to undress her in the dark, your teeth to sharpen themselves onto her flesh. Her knees rise above the bed by themselves, like air bubbles, and knock her over. Her pubis illuminates the ceiling as if by magic. The pubis, and, within, phosphorescent, her swim bladder. But she, submerged in her eddying internal rivers, splits the tongues with her nipple, glues the navel projectile against your forehead,her breasts biting your mouth like tiny monkeys.And it's only at dawn that the darkness of her entrails evaporates,just enough that she, bit by bit, turns transparent. And you, you no longer see her because of the magic light, because of the gestures too hurried, too rhythmic. You know that in the hollow of every bed hides a swimmer, reflected in the ceiling mirror. [End Page 29] Linda Maria Baros Linda Maria Baros is a poet, translator, and publisher with a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne University. Baros has published seven books of poetry, including La nageuse désossée: Légendes métropolitaines (The Deboned Swimmer: Metropolitan Legends, Le Castor Astral, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 Grand Prize for Poetry by the Writers' Society, France; the 2021 International Francophone Prize of the Montréal Poetry Festival; and the 2021 Rimbaud Prize of the Poetry House, Paris. Her poems have been published in translation in forty-one countries. The winner of the prestigious Apollinaire Prize, Baros lives in Paris. Emily Graham Emily Graham is a writer and translator of contemporary French poetry. From Cleveland, Ohio, she lived in Connecticut for four years before returning to the Midwest, where she is currently an MFA student in literary translation at the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of the 2022 World Literature Today Student Translation Prize in Poetry for her translation of Linda Maria Baros's poem "Je sors dans la rue avec l'ange." Her work is forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation. Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College

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