Peacock Island, Its Alchemist
The alchemist was given the island to see what he could make with its distance— red glass he called jewel and isolation. I have been given no island, and yet I made a baby, another. Jewel and isolation were valued, but the island was taken back from the alchemist. I’m often given a place to leave—words glassy in the wake of departure. And glass is no ruby. Blood is no ruby, no border. I believed this even before I came to the mainland where blood is everywhere a key. Oh! The architecture. Or: Oh! That asshole. On the island there’s little red glass remaining. Who wants a room filled with the blood of light, the dredge of imitation sun, the thrum of being inside a body and the seep and the lack of armor? Here make armor with this: fake jewel, impending isolation.
Peacock Island, Its Alchemist
“Dear friend, dear friend, for a long Zeit I lived here inside my Glaslaboratorium and wondered glass into rubies. Glass is not enough. Its seethroughness will pull you through into a poverty of flash. The princes want to prance red in reflection so I smelt until the glass swarms bloody with fine gold dust. Fire made me a fancy man of change and then made me a ruin, ruined transformation, showed my light hold on the space between yes and uh oh. To be forced off an island—the rabbits staring at your back as you go—it’s losing your own dense core. Even here in Sweden, I can’t blush.”
X
The city of X: The blackbird’s unadulterated vocabulary. What infiltrates the blackbird’s sentiment? Crow caw, death maw. I too keep my languages straight, speak Y in Y. A in A. I speak Me in Me. I yell sound into the water of the bath. (Cover me, water.) But still: the languages inbreed silt. Songbirds have an organ for song. The city of X is an organ for home. Pum pum. I am an organ for what I choose: violence or thought. Sex or sleep. Eating or walking. I don’t sing. I don’t swim. On the tour of nothing left I can hear the old dialect in the walls singing, don’t sing, don’t swim, violence or thought.
Jennifer Kronovet is the author of two poetry collections: The Wug Test (Ecco Press, 2016) and Awayward (BOA Editions, 2007). Using the name Jennifer Stern, she co-translated Empty Chairs, the poetry of Chinese writer Liu Xia, and she also co-translated The Acrobat, selected poems of experimental Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin. She edits Circumference Books, a new press for poetry in translation.
