100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
May, 2018For my clumsy back,
Expanding into the dirt,
To my footsteps beneath my footsteps
To the breath of touch.
Limits in high relief, outside limits.
The shadow for my shadow, my back.
Stunned by beauty, breathless in the silk
In death’s bay.
My eyelashes fall heavy, re-touching
The water, the repose
Diamond-shaped, like a fractured Christ.
Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude (1912-1971) was a surrealist poet who published several volumes, including Dialogue de mes lampes y Tabou (1941), Déchu (1956), and Dimanche (1973). He was also a member of the black nationalist movement Noirisme, and one of the founders of Les Griots, a quarterly scientific and literary journal.
Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. earned MFAs in creative nonfiction writing and literary translation from The University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous Press and Don’t Come Back from Mad River Books, as well as editor, with Sarah Viren, of the forthcoming anthology Essaying the Americas. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation work has been featured in journals including Bellingham Review, Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers, and The Sunday Rumpus, among others. She won Best of the Net and Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus, Ohio to Richmond, Virginia, where she works as an assistant professor for Virginia Commonwealth University. Visit www.linawritesessays.com.
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Addie Leak (French editor) is a freelance translator and editor currently living in Amman, Jordan. She holds an MFA in literary translation from The University of Iowa and has published translations from French, Spanish, and Arabic in various literary journals as well as in Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, edited by Olivia Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. She also coordinated the creation and publication of Lanterns of Hope: A Poetry Project for Iraqi Youth, a 2016 collaboration between The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and the US Embassy in Baghdad.
English translation copyright (c) Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., 2018.