Anny Ballardini

hulaan = music
kundimaan = Philippino lowe song

she wonders why the sea behaves so strangely; today, its stillness unnerves her, she knows that it’s

extraneous in a land where there is no sea and the sky breaks into violent storms and words rise to midair with the calls of birds                          wolfsong, found poems. ///                          after Barbara Jane Reyes

I am the snake drag queen
I am l’Aventurera by Gout, Michele Pierri with eleven children
I am the Iti the Gringa
I am the African, the Algerian, Derrida at La Sorbonne
I am el Topo
I am my own naked child my wife
I am my 4 enemies
I am my crippled outdistanced isolated group
I am my Apocalypse Now
I am Teresa Melo
I am Deuteronomy I’m the Devil
I am the Protestant, the Christian, the Agnostic, the Jew
I am the synthesis of my thesis and antithesis
I am the tooth
I am the subjective of the objective
I am the objective of the subjective
I am the Tulane library
I am the idea of displacement
I am the in-between_ness, Bréton and Cocteau
I am the hurricane and the carnival the Green and the Blue
I am the Manifesto of the Surreal
I am the surreal of the manifest
I am the real without the manifest
I am sure there is no real


There is no such thing as repetition but insistence
Susan Schultz when talking of Gertrude Stein



                                                                           after Meg Withers / page 46

                                                                           (ellipsis) an epiphany

                                                                           (underscore) tears
                                                                           (underscore) dying
                                                                           (underscore) our
                                                                           (underscore ellipsis) bodies
                                                                           (underscore ellipsis ellipsis) without skeleton

                                                                           (capital letter) Death has come with its scythe and it
                                                                           reached our home


                                                                           (ellipsis) and (capital letter) He walked down and told them
                                                                           to stand up and eat (ellipsis)

DEUTERONOMY 09:50

SUICIDES
float   up like
colored balloons
“Look     at that one,
daddy!” a kid points
to the third last
in a row the
most
complex
with Hippocrates’
hues lingering above
Paradise Restaurant.
Christian,
by name not
by creed,
says
on

the phone:

I know       you know
and    an     echoing
what    has been
hollowing in
me



ODE TO THE GARBAGE CAN
                                                             Marianne Faithful, Say it in broken English


waste bins    trash cans    in stainless steel    free standing    built-in    commercial    outdoor    smokers’ urns    for bathrooms    medical or recycling    adorned with trash bags    in durable metal    fiberglass    plastic    wood bamboo    glass    aluminium concrete    in heavy-duty steel to withstand harsh weather conditions    water-proof with tilt-out trash units     all sizes    all colors from the spectrum of light    :

in wavelengths and frequency intervals


mauve    lavender magenta    chartreuse    viridian    tangerine    apricot    lime    psychedelic purple    burgundy    aqua    salmon    crimson    army green    terra cotta    azure    fuchsia    jade    salmon    brass    turquoise    bistre    wisteria    cyan    deep cerise    lilac    papaya whip    zinnwaldite    amber    French rose and French blue    elegant shades of grey (arsenic, taupe)    heliotrope    indigo    Pearl    ivory    mint green    saffron    Tea rose    amaranth


what organizational rationality
                                              a drainage system
                                              sparkling clean homes
what genteel dreaming estates
                                              bottle shards on bordering walls
                                              to keep thieves out _ microbial fauna eliminated
what an uplifting relief
                                              a tornado
                                              unwanted debris sucked out
what indescribable soaring
                                              Quetzalcoatl
                                              the feather serpent

                                                            Olé! Teresita!
                                                            Linda mujerita!
                                                            Hay amor come me has puesto
                                                            Hay hay hay

Hay

I

sing of the white man    with blue eyes    his stirring beauty    the one who migrated to mines    caught as a prisoner of a war he did not know    existed    and of another man    forced to a war he knew    :::    gutters etched out into the guts of earth    _Anthracite Annual Report Pennsylvania Mining Activities_     deafening magnetism broken backs    your ribs against the ribs of earth    lungs as rock    your flesh so lean you are bone    clinging like an hermit to the caves’ cartilage    _WATER_AIR_LIGHT_    pulp mates under the rumble    (pray and see)    in the swallowing vertiginous darkness those in your visions    (they will never understand)    your broken teeth under the suffocating tension of 16-18 hours in the night to come out and collapse in the night so that

WEEEEEEEEEEEEE

can be white-collared Elizabeth queens projected silvery queers

thank you, garbage cans

for having emptied our pasts

of confessional poetry



TIMES’ GAPS

DB
CF
                              in their memory

In the domain of knowledge, we encounter this logic of separation when, all of a sudden, we see that what we thought was the limitation of our knowledge about a thing is in fact an inherent limitation of the thing itself.
              from Interrogating the Real by Slavoj Zizek

our times
               distant and different from the following times
               free love? Maybe
               with the gloomy viscous bat of Christianity

                              Life is a horizontal fall
                                                  by Jean Cocteau

then there came the yuppies
               they’d sell their mothers for a Martini
               let alone parts of their bodies
               free love as pitiful commerce
               the same term ‘love’ went out of fashion
               used as the formal epitaph on tombstones
               on the plus computers became a must

then there came the need for uniqueness
               at an international and personal level
               the conscious need to reassert one’s own self (-consciousness)
               I’m not you
               cultural identities made news headlines
               on the plus mutual responsibility became a must

then there came social catharsis for change
               Pound’s make it new turned into a creed
               dramatic global recognition of greenhouse effects sound air water pollution
               on the minus whole food chains at exorbitant prices

then there came dissolution
               religions at stake
               lies unveiled
               that is where we are now
               still a year to go.

                              To the States
                              To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
                              Resist much, obey little.
                              Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
                              Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
                              afterward resumes its liberty.
                                                  by Walt Whitman


generational imprints

a codified automated DNA perceived as intuition

Aztec stars dictating performative gestures

in the everlasting sameness for the single being

updated perception’s urgent changes in the collective unconscious delirium.

How, then, are we to specify this ‘knowledge’ which, even in our era of cynicism, brings about effects in the Real? Perhaps the best approach to it is via the opposition between violent coercion and ‘genuine’ subordination.
              From The Indivisible Remainder: on Shelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Zizek

Anny Ballardini lives in Bolzano, Italy. She grew up in New York, lived in New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Florence. A poet, translator and interpreter (simultaneous interpreter for English, French, Italian), she teaches high school; edits Poets' Corner - Fieralingue, an online poetry site; and maintains a blog, Narcissus Works. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from UNO, University of New Orleans, Chair and Director Bill Lavender. Besides various full length publications of translations on the market, to be mentioned is her collection of poems, Opening and Closing Numbers, published by Moria Editions, 2005. Otoliths will be publishing Ghost Dance in 31 Movements, her thesis collection, later this year. A detailed CV can be found here.

 
 
 
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