2017 / poetry / author

YVES OLADE

JUDA RECONSIDERED
…

a twenty minute walk to Jericho, with every house on the street still on fire. you
can’t put out the sunset in the middle of summer with just a blanket and a
bucket of water no matter how hard you try. a cold bottle and seventeen
cameras. a temple. no anchor, only a film reel recording disaster as it happens live.
audience leaning so close that their clothes almost catch light. and
just like the shark becomes the wide ocean, so does the smoke become

the dark sky. walking blue streets in light drizzle. you heard the thunder echo
far beyond the cathedral spires. you felt every body on the road like a cut that
won’t close. I’ve started thinking of people as wounds that don’t heal.

several things survive here: lemonade and absinthe; a single dying flower
on the windowsill, and art prints of Vermeer and Klimt. a short book. you know
that this is all you have gathered in the past eight weeks. two singles for the
same bus ride and a museum with a thirty steps. you’ve still never been
inside. the ground shaking and still, the sky still shaking. grey in a body of
water; an empty bottle of water. a moon that you can cover with your palm.

anger, sometimes. rage, always. rage, always. a man in the street with an
umbrella and a peaked cap, talking about hell and how he wants to take you
there. pain in your lower abdomen. lent. a wall of flames around your childhood
home. a prayer. the kind of violence that only exists inside the colour red,

                                                                              but you’d know all about that.

TRANSLATION: AN INTRODUCTION
…

you forget,
I’ve watched you split my heart open like a pomegranate
and carve the seeds out with your bare hands—nails stained
the same colour of the sky as the sun sets in rome.

I know how your rage can light a thunderstorm or flood a town;
so if there’s ever blood on your hands again, I want it to be mine.

I watched the sun rise from the walls of constantinople and
considered surface tension and breaking point—how long patience
can bear to hold.

how do you live with a guilt so large it’s like the moon is
hanging over your head, just waiting for a moment to fall
that could devastate the world?

what I mean is, how do you touch a lover who can’t even
say your name? I had a body that felt everything and
we couldn’t talk about it, so I pretended I didn’t have a
body and that I couldn’t feel anything.

I was another one of your pretty things
a cracking painting hanging over the fireplace:
oil on canvas, still life of boy with his fist against the
wall, cut from hip to collarbone.

and after you left I turned the lights back on and slept on
sofas all over town. I sewed stars back into constellations
to fill the gaps in the wallpaper. I don’t want to be the one
putting holes in things anymore.

And now it’s been 5 years. imagine that. the distance between
us a landscape that learned to paint itself, and now it can’t stop
its hands from moving.

I called from the wrong side of a fire door to tell you that I
might come home. static and silence. then you said,

                                                                                 don’t.

SKIN
…

and it’s always you leaning over to grab the wheel, you saying put that
down / and it’s okay / and sometimes the sky cracks without breaking—
it’s not breaking. but I couldn’t talk to you even if I could talk about it.
I couldn’t stand for you to know me, to feel how tight this skin stretches
over the sharp corners of my skeleton. I didn’t cry when you laid me out
on that marble altar, soaked red from the blood of everything you’ve ever
had to sacrifice. the kind of boy-saint that martyrs everything but himself:
just everything he’s loved and could get his hands on.

& there’s still room on this, our stone bed, so will you lay down with me?
press a sword into the space between our hips? softer than some things
I could name but won’t because that’s not who we are / not who you made
me. you said forever, but I can only count so high / I don’t know what

happens after midnight. what if the stars shake themselves free from the
vacancy of space? would you tell me?

you know what I mean by that. shaking / I mean, shaking / I mean,
watching the sun implode and not running, just admiring the new sky up
close. salt and the scent of ozone. but in this version of the story, I’m still
on the altar. I’m still waiting to find out if I can carry a violet sun inside

me. you taught me to immolate myself for the smallest things: I mean,
burying our bodies in the garden / trying to grow roses.

SOMETHING I’D LIE ABOUT
…

And it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but
now this is all you have: how you’d argue
until the car spun off the road and couldn’t
hear a sound over the shouting but how
you’d still feel the impact. and so you can
stand it, you want him to tell you that he
likes it like this: prying open the sky with his
bare hands every night to check for further
breakage, but he doesn’t. neither do you.

Sometimes you think that if you mention
the gaping cracks in the roof it won’t support
its own weight anymore. & you both know
it’s no way to live—knowing that the sky is
going to fall one day, but trying to save
yourselves by not naming it—but waiting for
it out of the corner of your eyes, like all those
shadows in the mirror you saw as a child.

And if you’re being honest with each other
for once, you’re both still afraid of the dark.

So you stack all those bodies back in the
wardrobe to rot. you don’t have time to bury
them again. the skies are bending right above
you, weighed down with a sin heavy enough to
almost grace the earth. you wanted to love

him in a way that didn’t hurt & now you know
that isn’t love at all. sometimes, you still want it.
Meanwhile, all the blue in the world is burning,
even if you won’t look at it.