As Georg also Greta
as Greta same-said awakened
Ill as when when as whereas Georg
feels as a weird pressure
word pressure
Never faced this corner before
My metallic body pale green like the death of underpainting
leprous corrosion of rosy
skin
Or silver-white metallic
Liquid is
metaphysical liquids
How morphine into
fluid or flow
Although he said crystal method
the two brothers same-said it: crystalline
The sister sounded liquid
changing easily yet metallic
Ergo mercury aka Hermes then w/ the love also, aphrodisiac
metaphysics
Was Grete a hermaphrodite?
Her mental dick
My metal lick
This phallic metallic
or tastes blood the same blood her/my husband’s idea
St. Januarius was before he met Lou, she destroyed him, he resurrected himself
But spurn his pathos.
accident comedy vs. substance comedy
substance monism
illegal substance monism
As when awoke from restless troubled uneasy worried
figment
noisy dreams sans fig leaf or daydreams was she sleeping during the day
again intoxicated, high
Intoxicant idealism
Stimulant idealism
Narcotic idealism
Addictive idealism
Chemical idealism
it is all so chemical or like the chemistry we shared
myself and my brothers myself and my sister-in-law myself and my father
Once your breast is broken
chest organ
Also broke Greta Thurstan
I never did this before like this
unknowing
the white disc of the table almost too
small for the metallic meanings
Morose morph morpheme morphia morphine morphology
How the word is the body, their illogic
my beautiful brother Georg his logos
Georg meaning farmer as in husbandry
therefore never Ferdl/Grete’s husband Arthur
But I mean mercury
stayed fluid in the room
at room temperament
Am I locked in here have they locked me in a detox? This asylum
As Greta Thurstan awoke one twilight from uneasy
when they say that she was easy
numbing vs. goading
the sweet brother/pond whispered narcotic idealism
the sharp sister/whirlpool retorted stimulant idealism!
weren’t identical twins
weren’t fraternal twins
smell of my male armpits, their hair
or my female hair as temptation said
she shaved hers I thought shirt off
is the type of woman who gives women a bad
Like, vampire!
Awoke as Georg
while Greta is the vampire
or Lilith
So tired of being alone, without him
do you understand?
oh brother and sister
substance abuse dualism
I his narcotic, he my stimulant
he my tic, I his Antlitz
Grete and Georg’s overlap
in her lap he put his face trip
or tripping
meanwhile Friedrich aka Ferdl, Ferdek
A megalomaniac
Syphilis vs. leprosy
mercury used for skin infections
the skin a love organ
I play the organ, also the piano and
this other keyboard
Ferdek would improvise for hours, put himself into a trance or intoxicated state
inebriation idealism
At some point, you leave the notes beyond I mean behind quit scoring, play new notes impulsive
Fetzen means rag, scrap, shred, fragment, bit, snatch, Fetzig means wild like Greta/Grete not like Lilith/Lili
fawn
fox
raven
from the brothers’ fairy tales or poems, stories
ersatz Fritz’s Kamel or the sleazy camel cigarettes
but leopard would be closer to Löwe. And to leper!
And Kind = kid
I hope this doesn’t destroy me, everything
I didn’t want to be numb
then something
What am I doing in this room?
They are all outside of it.
As my words taste blood like the test of key the door I can’t get the mixtype half-prose half-poetry ergo in labyrinth
not quite ready to stop but have to stop
do I still have an hour?
can’t get my head out of this bed, my bed out of this head
can think only of sex around me: hypocrite, tease!
Or as if all girls do is give each other head! Please!
Shall I demo how we’d fuck?
Cf. Georg’s hostile Grete unnerved by his poet friend,
mannish Jewish Else Masker-Schwuler!
Skin not always a disease
can cause disease, unease, uneasy daydreams dream days
vainglorious
liquid as clear, bright or something
snatches
From the clutches of clichés are deaths.
*
It was how the sound builds slowly. And after so much quiet, sounds impossibly loud.
A sound has volume only in the context of a sequence
but the stillness
not like death, deathly
shit caked in the sisters’ hair?
He says they go off to the old men
bare, leafless rooms
As Greta Thurstan awoke one dusk from
grown too hard my armor
Tired of this room.
then Greta Thurstan wanted to go out
but she couldn’t stand up, even sit, it
gave her vertigo, entailed edge of a
mountain, cliff, abyss, strophe
the high-pitched tone under the deep voice
I am a boy, my voice is changing!
She said, I like your high, girlish voice,
But she lied.
It was a Lied?
The unruined, unruly dream, to think you could avoid turning into your brother.
he was with golden sores glowing on his pale skin
his madness sat on his white chest
his back when he departed
the sister lies in the empty room of her brother
I have to get up, thinks Greta; I have to get out of here
Scored for piano, dark flute, vibraphone, chimes
The way it builds slowly, lacking tension
The collection of notebooks spread out
Or mean it was all the same notebook, referent, but w/ different senses
or w/ synonyms
Or partial synonyms as the senses interpenetrate in idiolects bounded yet open like worlds inside you except
Our inside-out skin our infectious influx in fucks
They said counterfactual, subjunctive as if Georg hadn’t
I don’t know how to
how to do this I don’t
know how to do this any
more I
more don’t
know more
I I
It was a traveler, wanderer, Wanderleben
The picture a photo from their wedding or an author’s
photo I mean translator’s I mean they will move my body
when it is a corpse, won’t you, dear brother
and sister?
The street like sandpaper to rub you raw
I would like to rub
you raw
your awe
prove naked
warring orb
there exists the rub
would like to
rub/out/do
erasure
use a rubber not get pregnant
The young woman with my brother draped all over her
a pet a pelt
My brother Gregor hirsute
or a snake
she is disappearing into the beast animalistic
all over me like a dead thing skin
ach my writing desk is too small and white my
chest my body
my weak chest which as always
now w/ teen acne
I am turning into a boy!
I am turning into a vampire!
Into a knight in shadow armor
Into a leper
Into a phrase that sounds rushed, forced, unclean
my feelings
their words
their syntax
I do not want my feelings.
I want a system to avoid, spurn my
feelings
Ferdinand?
She ran away from him.
Tonight a literary party
It said a storm
came down from a high to find herself lying
I can hear, but I hear only ringing. In my ears, not outside them.
It was supposed to be a dream.
Now a rant.
my italic hair
I could not keep everything, the world, in my mind
so parts of the world went quiet, withered, died
spaced-out idealism
Does the world die in the pauses?
Versus how six made their way in the world. Greta and her five beloved brothers.
Why is that here?
And the sister-in-law should not be here.
Is she the father or the sister figure of my brother Gregor’s novella?
As Greta Thurstan awoke one evening, she found herself turned into her brother’s
novella.
It was thin, rusty-yellowish, lay on its back.
Nobody wanted to touch it, read it. Still wet. Her ink would stain them.
I promised, I will avoid the pathos!
But I lied.
It was too late?
*
Eternal reverse
Will to remake
Übermädchen
Will to make out?
and first-personalism , to replace Ferdinand’s perspectivism
oh, I have ideas!
Eternal reverse is oscillation. Our metaphysical essence.
Sempiternal would only be temporal. But the oscillation
beyond time, but in time.
eternal and temporal: the incarnation.
but not what happens after you die
but don’t you return?
fraternal return
I saw my
older brother
beautiful brother
ghostly brother
the bell rang
it went off in her head
she went off her head or in it
too many uppers/downers
it was the head brother
the principal or most valuable brother
the authorized representative brother
the procurer
the representational author brother
the lead brother, or the leaden one
to get possession of, obtain
to make women available for promiscuous
sexual intercourse
to achieve
procure prod prodigy prodigal
god
a god
goad
the good
suddenly disappeared into a room and
shoots herself full of lead
now the leading role or plays the lead or plays the Lied
knowing good in evil
too much stimulant!
spearhead serpent
their father’s prick?
Or was it the brother’s?
The same brother? Or an older brother?
Such as Gregor? He liked to watch this.
But the fall is philosophical. Compose it.
Übermädchen. Übermaß. Don’t be such a sissy!
Gregoire Pam Dick (aka Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al.) is the author, qua Mina, of Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009). Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe, EOAGH, Fence, Telephone, and elsewhere, and is featured in the latest issue of Postmodern Culture; it is included in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (ed. TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, Nightboat, 2013). Her book Metaphysical Licks is forthcoming from BookThug in 2014.
A new translation with contemporary allusions that reflect the boldness of the original.
A new book of poem-drawings.
A conversation about creative process, told through art objects.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Leonardo Padura, Amie Siegel, Phyllida Barlow, Kai Althoff, Dodie Bellamy, Edwidge Danticat, Hans Witschi, and Mary Halvorson.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
