Sonja vom Brocke Biography

The doctor phantom on the terrace. If you slip out of your shoes now
will the serpent protect you or attack you?
And what now. No
...

a Lunatica cobbled together
from shorthand trunk and bones

; only as vocabulary Le Luxe von Bräuns supplied the milk for a
...

We're slipping away
watering the nymph temperature
conquering weak plant growth

a calcified nomen in the drain
the hip joints on
Golden Rain!
A sleepy, ticking egg.

Would that you, woman, and we other erasers
would meet the curses
alertly and at the same time in slow motion.
Let us gather scattered stubby platelets
in the pockets of our white coats

they'll yield
lovingly nest
exhausted and laying in phlegm
still full of ether confused with heavenly poison
alone and in one, their care.

Which will help us in a more terrible time.
Having come through, softer to permanence.

While heated teenie choirs race
through space
blindly petrifying in fright
of the sun - it's brighter than you think! -
and themselves.

The charred ones. Shorn of all but tentacles
they wave to their relations
and tap keys to each other:

seahorse, seahorse, you
perhaps the glowing heat was
another way of being taken away


Poet's Note: another way of being taken away
From the farewell note of a young women which once came into my hands.


Translated by Catherine Hales
...

»I am boarded in - and they are juggling!«


you pile the bats into clumps of rage
chewing on leather tunics, work muscles
cram yourself into the heart
and nerve strangulators, a heart-nerve strangulator
machine gender, calibrated.

Of course calibrated! And it's abandoned by all reason
with the mini-jugglers in the courtyard of death
you feed in tassels, dried hermaphrodites, crust -


you bite into foam. Huh.
Nibble it off . . .


Translated by Catherine Hales
...

Walked up Auerstrasse, through the building site and forgot to take note
of which way I had gone - no thread, winding in like a tightening screw like persuasion, until the town was no longer fastened in fibres. Fever land, cyber land, cut off, was hardly a destination, for anxiously staying put.

A cemetery, in it a theatre, the old ladies still mothy, swathed
in their housecoats. Hats of the ravens. Their discordant conference, wreathed number on number about the ivy tomb. But their fluttering turned to dust (I admit that I let out a sob).

Sensitive spectre. Afterwards only the single feathers from the hat, which were not feathers, and fluttered on to the tombstone, which was a tombstone, and so on, but forever, unrelated in the rumble garden of absence into which I dissolved.

The clinic of broad daylight outside the walls a chalking-up of sober
time of day. Gauze and wheel bearings took over the lead, the car showroom, in the wall of a bridge, offered coffee. ‘Take a seat, that close and wings genuine! This skin is an animal for slaughter, well-stocked, coupling without obligation and here, the plastic button tames what you say - you say! Are you listening at all? Are you listening? Not a sound, now you can please get lost.'


Translated by Catherine Hales
...