Translation Manual
* * *
Xenos cactus grows in no man's land between Mexico and Arizona. There is talk about pregnancy, most certainly unwanted. See how blackbirds skip the event, poking around for worms and nuts. Juices are inviting, but I've forgotten the propaganda: dangerously potent or potentially dangerous? Accidentally, this is pure foreignness: TV Old World. Umbrellas are €5 and their shadows tell time, black on white; alienation is a bit more costly. I squint, zoom in: billions of small waves, each little crest a miniscule supernova exploding against the pebbles and rocks. Life has its own riot under the surface.
* * *
Up here, familiar geographies vanish beneath the clouds. I carry a handful of buttons in my suitcase on wheels. A button for Air India, another for Malev, even a button misspent on Virgin Airlines. Talk dirty, but articulate, you cockpit cocktail waitress you. Together, we parody an unwritten code. I rehearse Eurosongs with the rebellious crew, as if no war's going on. We’ll win a gilded statue, love of multitudes, warm wet towels in the business class. Each connecting flight is a code-shift.
* * *
I sew long Tibetan sleeves, my acrobat's face gleams, small tornadoes of dust swirl. A disc of kneaded dough illuminates the afternoon sky, slowly rising for great-grandmother's Bosnian bread (witchcraft in the making). I wipe off beads of sweat, and there'll be nothing left but terror by the time I hurl the disc. The Moon, a deviation, appears a little redder each time it peeks behind the Wilmington roofs. Courthouse. Theater. Steeple. Smith Funeral Home. So this is known as fate. My great-grandmother's face is my own face, her/my thick hair braded and hidden beneath a calico kerchief.
* * *
These games are about the friendly fervor of our five continents. How many years did it take Marco Polo to return to Venice with the Khan's fleet of fourteen ships? Fifteen, nine, eighteen years? The time it took: three years. One more and The Games would have been thrown. I approach truth with vigilance. Six hundred men accompanied Marco, and only eighteen survived the narrative. The paper I use for maps is tough, nearly transparent, a bit oily. I pencil the Olympic rings outlining peace, conflict, war, ceasefire, negotiations.
* * *
Bodies cling together in spite of malice. The army creeps in the valley; city boulevards already shudder. We created our own history, an orphanage of runaway circus freaks in an art nouveau building with no running water. Artists, new or old, don't always think of practicality or collateral damage. It's murder, I told you I was doomed, Vienna was only a temporary solution. The top cat, safe and helmeted, contemplates his next meal. Do I slip out with my guitar? Smuggle machine guns to the guerilla fighters out in the woods? Our appetite stronger than survival instinct, you hold my head under it, like they taught you in the spy program, like any disillusioned alley kid would. It's my turn to fetch the water. I've always known I would make a hell of a refugee.
