IT GETS HARDER TO FUNCTION IN THE WORLD
life is so much more bearable when you’ve got new music
but I’m starting to not even like music
I don’t have an accent
*you* have an accent
I have become partial to all kinds of distortions
which is how it begins pretty soon
I’ll need an outlandish array of sexual props to [anything]
once I had a fear of waterslides
and my wife was raised by white supremacists
as difficult as that might be to believe
I like when this desperation comes to the fore
particularly in my friends
but this isn’t where I envisaged things ending up
just as I never envisaged hiring out bouncy castles for a living
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SAM RIVIERE co-edits the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives, and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. Faber published his debut pamphlet in 2010. His first book is ’81 Austerities’ (Faber & Faber, 2012).
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Learn more about Sam Riviere:
Author Website
81 Austerities
S/S/Y/K
I was the last place on the planet /
where astronauts slept /
my last customers were the planet’s /
last people
"The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem."
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs /
and various birds anas crecca, /
there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks /
and the cracking of pinecones
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
