Marie de Quatrebarbes

from The Vitals

(translated from the French by Aiden Farrell)

September 1

Signs without referent: fauna-fiction. Fugacities rendered post-war. A sign is a party she watches from death. Can it be, one of these terrestrial days, that which produces the hurried disappearance of a connection? For, to exist, magic is uncertain. Put on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img. To exist, can it alone provoke uncert. fate?

September 2

We don’t trick her. And if she falls, we entrust her to the bees. Head forward, horns, bust. An elegance pageant. Figure of speech: circumstances. Everything is free here. Subtlety comes from the word. A fiction advances: the afternoon, the children…fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away. She turns. Her head, always, in the direction of the wind.

September 3

What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow. When I say “we” (apples)—the little lame duck, the one we put in the child’s pocket—I mean “he” saves himself (it isn’t him). A sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership—the reflection on an eye grows in the magnifying glass—loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.

September 4

Flat mouth (option to withdraw). Heard with mouth: porous. In the implementation of wind: window—its soaked nod. Focal: reclusion-adoration. The frozen function of a use.

September 5

This void: my skin illustrated it. We believe we are born, they say, from swarms of bodies, abstract nudities held in compromised steadiness. They call it: dreams. And we caress them. Our hands reach for their eyes. It’s how we treat things (they are not things). The rupture is often cold, this one, the same scream.

September 6

Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My window turned the world into a thin surface and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We find time in the same place we left it—in the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the library burned down and the books were devoured by flames. Say again: are mourners ever singular?

This excerpt from award-winning French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ The Vitals, forthcoming with World Poetry Books in 2025, is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
Marie de Quatrebarbes has published several books of poetry including Les vivres (P.O.L.) and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Walburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women: Madame tout le monde (Le Corridor bleu).

Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, and editor. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes will be published by World Poetry Books in 2025. He has published two chapbooks—lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence). Aiden is the managing editor of Futurepoem. Born in France, Aiden lives in Brooklyn.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.

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