CRÉTEIL
After Les Choux de Créteil by Gérard Grandval (1969-1974)
For Jesús Torres Garcia
it's the end of the lilac line and bushes blossom by the cabbage buildings zoom into 1960s space clusters on the outer ring each moulded leaf hanging with potential ungrown gardens barely pushing above the concrete absent cascades of green down temple curves where lives repeat in rockets that haven't taken off but stayed growing with hope buried in the cabbage fields provisional grass roots waiting at the point where the city ex- plodes on contact with the sky its force field propels us into slow traffic the sun radiating these days laced together under a car's metal roof a sound box pulsing where everything pushes out to the edges like being human as a slow explosion balanced on concrete stems every balcony's a sleeping ear turned up to the sky's blank transmission of tomorrow in rounded walls where fittings don't adjust to curvature mould to life that doesn't stack up in the circumference out of reach but still traced by your fingers
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ZOË SKOULDING is a poet, translator, editor and critic. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008). She has performed her work at many international festivals, often incorporating electronic sound in her readings as well as collaborating with musicians. Her monograph Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and she was editor of Poetry Wales 2008-2014. In 2014 she was a Laureate at Les Récollets, Paris, hosted by the Mairie de Paris and the Institut Français. She is Senior Lecturer in the School of English Literature at Bangor University.
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Read more work by Zoë Skoulding:
Author website
Poem in Blackbox Manifold
Poem in The Fortnightly Review