Livia Francini
What I am trying to tell you is
What I am trying to tell you is this:
there has been a proliferation, shall we say,
of what you may want to call process,
all I do lately is managing process, trying
to put a process in a place where maybe
there wasn’t a process before, place a bet on
What you need to do is rouse up some spirits
hail to the excited ones! Get some arses in chairs!
Students with questions file in
to a room, single seat up on stage
facing out to the woods.
You should write some of this down:
there are facts it seems, but in itself
knowledge is simply a mood. It will work for you
if you choose to make it work. There are
facts and these here are the facts:
this is the road we both grew on
I once kissed a man, then discovered
his family lived down the road
the decorations I hung up on my wall
doors down from hers, my choices of tableware
replacing wildlife with its ceramic substitute
What I am trying to say is I want to be a woman
but there have been too many women before me
a whole mothers’ monarchy, like a fuck-off, big
eye looking down from above: ‘I have met God and she is –‘
she’s a panic perspective, when sometimes all I want
is to stroke the soft fur of the fox
but the bitch withdraws from the hand that extends
and everyone is so late, so intolerably late, everyone
so late, everyone – we were so nervous
the app said one thing but the sun always
seemed to be shining from behind some other.
(Written in collaboration with Orsolya Fenyvesi)
LIVIA FRANCINI is a writer from Tuscany, Italy. She has translated Michael Donaghy, Sam Riviere and James Tiptree Jr. among many others and is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Our Available Magic (Makina Books, 2019) and a novel, Shelf Life (Doubleday, 2020).