from "Summer"
The larval aura makes summer sense to me who’s alone with my aftermath and the teeth have been torn out of the mask that represents mimicry nobody wants to tell me with summer-breaths where it hurts or who was injured when I broke into a toxic garble with a hissing snake for a heart when I was sweaty and tired I learned to kiss in the underworld with my mother tongue and my hymn to inflation already sung in a dazzling killer language I learned to speak in the most toxic state with my father tongue while the war was at war with a war and a mother war took place between summer and my virgin arms I know the emergency state of being alive has little to do with my tongue it has to do with the lies I tell my children with my father tongue I’m interviewing them for roles in lilac antigone it’s beautiful but it’s also a joke I have a dead child in summer I have trashed summer eyes with a million nightingales because I’m reading the plays of Eva Kristina Olsson
Credit
Copyright © 2018 by Johannes Göransson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“I wrote this poem as part of a longer sequence called ‘Summer’ while back in Sweden for a few weeks in the summer of 2017, staying at a friend's apartment, listening to a Swedish pop music channel and reading Eva Kristina Olsson's occult poems about molting angels. The whole sequence is an exploration of the fantasy of home as well as an exploration of the deep-seated Swedish mythology of summer. The poem is written in the language of these fantasies, but the language has been corrupted by history.”
—Johannes Göransson
Date Published
11/28/2018