Barbara Ellmerer

[ZB Magnet 3] Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), Magnes sive De arte magnetica tripartium (Rom: Blasius Diversis … Zanobius Masottus, 1654), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, NP 1, p. 528

Unpeel the imminent skin,
fissure the smooth beginning with
the knowledge of brows
that will pucker in disbelief,
this is not the face we knew,
this ravaged circuitry is another
way of acknowledging defeat,
who exposed it to our
eyes?

Sampurna Chattarji

Green planet in the light warm from lack of wind. Sails slice geometrically the air on a screen where the weather is constant, only the movement from another moving body can return her to a sense of time, an eagerness that travels from room to room like blood through slowly thickening veins. At such moments everything seems possible until it ends and the planet outside her window returns unchanged, except for a gradation from green to grey to yellow. This is the storm that will break all continuities and become a diatribe.

Sampurna Chattarji

Every hour the bird strikes. A coo at one, a caw at two. By the time it’s three she is thinking of seed, and the way that wings destroy sleep. She has never seen a woodpigeon or a woodchuck. At four the mockingbird returns. Beaks into minutes. One insistent peck at a time, the trunk riddled. Colour leaves her hair, nests elsewhere. A squawk at six, a shriek at seven. Give me a sec, she says, too hurried to finish that already small word. Forefinger on neck, she confirms she is alive.

Sampurna Chattarji

the livid angel who sings violet songs of praise,
there is no other warning except the one inside your chest,
open and you shall see, warm, good-looking,
the season of seasons,
every whiff of narrowness gone, bold, bolder still,
the cher ami from foreign songs,
this foreign body inside my eye blinds me,
like a tubular rose, rising towards the sun.

Sampurna Chattarji

Barbara Ellmerer