RACHEL GALVIN

I dream of marauding bands of young paramilitaries
and a tiger that’s actually a mountain lion
hidden underneath a couch in the living room
We can hear it mewling like cats coupling
as if it were plural and feral and ready to attack the children
Put a leash on it, you’ve got to get a leash on it!
I tell the tiger/mountain lion’s owner
who seems to me very negligent
The paramilitaries are young and clean-cut
they have weapons, automatic weapons, not rifles
they travel in groups of six
The president for life says Let’s give it a shot.


I’m crawling through air vents in a nursing home
I forgot to wear shoes again in this dream
My grandparents are sitting far below me
in a room with other Alzheimers patients
trying to sleep while sitting upright in armchairs
corded telephones next to them
with oversized keypads and extra-loud dial tones
I can’t find the key to my childhood home
since my mother stopped hiding it in the garage
I need it to get away from the paramilitaries
so I search rows of nacre-backed jewelry boxes
that smell of mold and hide no keys


My sisters and I stand on the corner
We discuss what kind of soup to make for our grandparents
(Butternut or tomato or lentil? Or should it be a stew?
But we always make a stew)
when a group of young guys comes up behind us
They hit us over the head with blunt objects and steal our cell phones
I throw mine as far as I can into the grass
but they find it with its shining LCD screen
They’re not yet paramilitaries but they are training
to become paramilitaries. Their blunt objects
are dress rehearsals for their assault weapons
Like the bombing at Guernica was a dress rehearsal
for the Luftwaffe. Like my dream
is a dress rehearsal for another dream

Are they all the same woman?

              same build
              same angst
              is she three?

I’ve repeated the same decision again and again

What do we accomplish while others sleep?



She stands amid the detritus

gathered in diseased disarray

watching caged children 

separated from their parents

she is paid by the hour to watch them



Hers is a land of imagined cornucopia



Her land is a carrion flower

with a misshapen phallus

resembling a loaf of bread

and the fragrance of rotten meat

swarmed by flesh flies

and carcass-eating beetles



Her land is a carrion flower

warm as a human body

with the aroma of sweat

jasmine mothballs feces decomposing fish


She has three options

            | call the wolves to her

            | warn the others about the wolves 

            | offer herself to the wolves


Is there a fourth option


As you can see, the corroded flowers

            are much larger than she is


Venus flytraps try to pass as tulips

bloody-jawed, tubular

            raunchy, muscular

raw with hunger

            vinegar tongues

teeth hidden by bruised lips



the earth is wounded with children

the earth’s wounds are bearing children



When she makes an appeal

a triangle forms


the appeal : plus the longing : plus the introspection


further : blood drip of pert peony


emerging – bitterly – emerging tiger –

emerging – wood panel accompanied by : striations



as in a flayed blossom 

–  following fireworks – following primacies –



fallacies – following fetishes –

shattered emergence | diluted blood 



(in water?) (in wood?)



whether her three selves are the last three left | whether they are the first three

a place to attain?  a place from which to flee?




where tigers may bathe 

where roots may rust

in irrigated soil

for soil read soul


grated

haphazard


yet the colors glisten

in shades for example     of mustard dung masticated food  



Flowers are beacons

are antennae are scopic



For flowers read children


            WHAT DOES THIS CORRUPTION SERVE
            & HOW DID IT GET HERE


The protestors are right there

two blocks away

what does it take to get up

extract yourself

from your bourgeois stupor

I don’t know

I’m asking you

I hope you know



           Salmon light hangs

                     shining upon their foreheads

the light gleams in shades of labia 

                     their vermin their wisdoms


           in the gloam of gold

           they gloat



notable, these middle-class emotions

notable, what these women can do

with contempt


young women suspended between

a state of action

and inaction



She is on the verge

of oration 

to (st)utter on the platform

she built for herself



(ask yourself a harder question)

what will you make out of the quantity of your breaths

would they even listen to you if you spoke

(a harder question)

(once again, with less guilt)

What happened then

What ripped


a helicopter arrived


her selves split

she held a colloquy

among them

none could claim

primacy



One: waits for another woman to do it

The second: forfeits

The third: addresses the crowd within her and without

How far away are they?



This is not about community

so much as it is about     which         world

            you actually live in

beyond the one you think you do

either way no one may listen to you





What are these flimsy words – or – fetid flowers –


          – However –


Her Feet Are Underscored In Red She Is Underlined


She

the woman who is three

hides behind herself



Her hair of three different shades crisscrosses itself

Her three heads flower like brass tubas


she is shipwrecked

in three attitudes of delay:



| downcast

| impatient

| agitating for action




and she

in private she blooms for herself only

the others face skyward but she has plans

she sits upon her dead sisters

the carrion beetles creep into the tuba-like opening 

the closer you look the more you will see

Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her newest book of poems, Uterotopia, was published by Persea Books in January 2023. Galvin is the author of Elevated Threat Level, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Pulleys & Locomotion. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, winner of the 2014 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poetry, a finalist for the 2019 National Translation Award. Her current translation project is supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing appears in journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, a creative translation collective, and is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature Studies at the University of Chicago.