Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

I’ve scattered my body

I’ve scattered my body. My knee in the Puszta. My aortas under the sleeping vicugnas. My eyeballs under second class seats in German trains. My cracking bones at the sites of transit airports and random histories. Right palm in more hands than I can recall. And my left in the pockets of trousers taken apart by long dead moths. When will I be ready? In the quiet night, I crept out of myself, and while the death knell sang I ate the remains of what I’d shed. My only food: the error of repetition. Here are grapes of Dionysius and ripe berries, which burst into a dismembered body in the face of terror, that of a smiling god. I cannot forget that I’ve scattered my throat in the Poetoviona and that oblivion is my necessary dessert after starving. It’s only the third stanza, but I already resist being disgusted with the first-person narrative. But how else to grant the body an instinctive emotional intelligence (or rather the logic of lunacy?), which travels across time and joins a pale cheekbone from Pontus with a crooked nose from Ravenna with a mutilated arm from Voronezh with a slender breastbone from Bukovina with an ear from Laz with a rib that, in this place, joins with this place, for an unknown, presumably never-born moment?

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