BATAILLE’S EGGS

I’m cooking dinner
I’d like to tell you about it
But Pat Metheny is playing
Don’t know why
I have ginger in my teeth
A bottle of vodka and wine
I have something for everyone
I am chopping
Chopping to the just
To the house sounds
Dripping
Knocking
An acorn on the roof
Repetitive acts of autumn
Indecision
To eat or to stow
When you ask me if I’m hungry
It means you are hungry
I have learned this
I am surfacing
I’ve considered the challenges
To face in bare winter
Bare because nothing falls here
For so long I cannot say
Indecision
Nothing falls
But evening’s answer
And a gate that swings
Creaks
Means you are coming

QUESTIONABLE STATES IN THE WEST

A brief and vivid sopping persists in cadmium.

To a warm potato, one for each pocket.

Will dry differently by morning old things, foxholes dot the school hill.

The last piece of hobnail milk glass is sunrise this morning.

Pale gray lamp recovers a permeable room.

So you sleep everyday as well as ask me the questions that only sleep can.

So you ask of each snow stride turn me round this rock.

So you ask of darkened pictures.

SUNLESS MANIFESTO

A mushroom sets the record
in spores, relief
says the powder blue pressed flower
into the dead fawn apostrophe
some squalor needing to

when I only think in red
only think in sex
cremation awaits, I support
probity mechanics at rest
sleep the Velvets clang
and Baudrillard awake at 3 a.m.
very much so
if I ever find stillness, iteration null
inkling I may not return

says the universal veil
across the skein smudged missive
blood inside the body
too strange, still blue

Rachelle Rahmé is the author of the poetry collection Count Thereof Upon The Other’s Limbs (72 Press). Her poetry, essays and fiction have been published by The Brooklyn Rail, earthbound press (UK), The Blue Letter, VLAK (Prague), Aventures Ltd., FPBJPC and the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet. She has presented her work in sound & text for Issue Project Room, Roulette Intermedium, The Kitchen and Bánh Mì Verlag, among other venues. Born in Lebanon, she is an independent researcher and translator interested in liberatory methodologies.

pre-order Bataille’s Eggs here.

Painting by Pieter Schoolwerth