Monika Rinck – 3 Poems

There are items of news about things that lie beyond your control, / Weary One. You let go of the steering wheel because soon, so very / soon, it’ll work autonomously and you’ll be your own passenger! / Sounds worrying, because you don’t have a passenger. That’s true.  / But the heightened dynamic of development continues unabated / and just before their deaths a handful of homeless Californians have / clearly somehow collided with this development, visually, sonically, / tangibly, you needn’t do anything, look around, the berth’s up top, / the lines glide by, just make sure you remain open to perceptions, / hey, that means you, and it includes longitudinal and lateral control / so you can always fulfil your duty in compliance with Paragraph 2, / even if you’ve turned away from what’s taking place, woe betide, / and are able, where necessary, to override or deactivate the system, / as if you were sitting at home, on the basis of the standard sensors, / or if the highly or totally automated functions were not all there, / or not there at all, intervening, as someone in the vehicle’s interior / of vectors, the deeper one digs, the further inside one penetrates. / When the sensor redistributes the signs for the deceleration lane, / the lanes, the chaff, regurgitates empty language again and speaks, / and the people they don’t notice. That really breaks your heart. / Oh how weary I’m getting, Weary One. Such severity is spreading. / Meanwhile things are disappearing, they’ve espoused the void, / an emptying and annihilation of space by – I hardly know what by, / you tell me: Where to transport all the weary-hearted ones if now / they’re driving all alone, as the forlornest of cargoes? By the way, / Ramses is in the Odysseum, his last stop in Europe. Go to sleep now. / The amoebas are transporting new dangers, diseases, automatons. / Weary One, go into sleep mode now, don’t stare at things any more, / go to sleep, for it’s not the beloved who’s riding on libido’s tracks, / the death drive pulls up, and you’re going to be your own passenger.

If it slips down like butter
it might well be propaganda.

The sun is a mighty star. / 

Solar flares. Heat collapse. A geomagnetic storm! / Highly charged particles right down to the ocean’s depths! / Space shuttles vaporized in any old scalding stratosphere. / Supernovas and so forth. Crop failure on Earth. Crumbs. Crumbs. / Erosion of farmland. Huge clouds of sand not far from Constance. / 

But which star is mightier still, far mightier than the solar star? / I’ll give you a clue. How mighty is the star I have in mind? Listen up: / 

It deletes the legacy, it totally deletes half of Bavaria, / it deletes the norm and grammar, it deletes the law, / deletes the league, the union, plunders the academies / and then just leaves the plundered academies behind, / the arts pages gave long since been deleted, der die das, / it deletes, deletes, deletes, and it never stops deleting. / 

Finally, it deletes (aargh!) even the sun, / deletes all the other stars, casts them down. / As the mightiest star, it deletes every single star / in its vicinity and drops them like hailstones on Bottrop! / 

Perhaps you’ve already guessed, or maybe you do have an idea by now? / It’s the GENDER STAR!* / 

It likes you. And it’s already begun with its deleting / to one side of you. And now it’s coming to the other side. / 

Incidentally, this is all written with lemon / juice on blotting paper and then boldly / ironed over. Just set fire to it and it’s gone.

*The gender star (Gendersternchen) has been used in German for some time now to form gender-inclusive nouns, e.g. Bäcker*innen, for bakers who identify as male, female and all other genders between and beyond.

All poems translated by Nicholas Grindell