My City - Jean D’Amérique

                                for a city whose wound is mine

the streets

are nameless

because of traveling crime

a tower of  flames at its back, my city binges on

fresh canons, sings of a life that sags on the page,

it watches humans fall as if it’s watching cascades

of piss

~

your passport concrete reinforced with ripples

your screen the roofs that dribble misery

Port-au-Prince

you breathing rubble

you tenant of the void

but memory shambles

my city of difficult hours

what time won’t slump in your eye

~

Nights rise from the other side of azure urges. The

nights take command of hope’s byways. Life

falls aside so the lamps can pass through.

It so happens that we lay the sun low at midday.

Sky damp with a red pact. A canonized city? Far

from it. It fires fires fires on the beauty passing by.

Glory to the canons’ rain.

~

all the time

the pestering head the enormous blue paper

it struggles to touch

my city

on the monumental edge

of blood

joint

of lethal pleasures

subsidy of lungs swaying

up to the lips’ threshold

dreading being burned

~

in our ranks

the weapons are allowed to walk

every single street

knows how to live without chaos

in the silvered glass of death

the weapons are allowed to walk

to stride under the eyes of the day

not a single light will be shed

on the question of the black dead ends

---

Jean D’Amérique (born 1994) Haiti

Translated by Conor Bracken

Source: sx salon 40 • June 2022