THREE POEMS by Sandra Moussempès trans. Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy

NON-IDENTIFIED FEMININE OBJECTS 

Cinematic princesses escaping from an Eastward facing convent have long known the limits of where they can go 

Fatigued from hours of forest walking, they have taken refuge in a haunted house, abandoned since 1972, they now know that at any moment the story could stop 

The film could disintegrate, and they will go back to their well-to-do families in Beverly Hills or to one of the luxurious, seaside subdivisions of Santa Monica 

For the moment they chew their wild strawberry bubble gum, listen to Dubstep while wiggling in the bronze corridor, lying on old mattresses spread out over the hard dusty floor 

Corn flakes caked on the kitchen table since 1972, the box is draped in spider webs, the advertisements hold the faded colors of the time 

We sense something vaporous in the atmosphere, ectoplasms searching for their story, bodies trying to infiltrate other bodies 

We do not know what is being woven here, any explanation would be incomplete in light of the breadth of the invisible debates, the voice-overs intermingle: 

Where are the memories of which you have no memory?

CINDY SYNDROME (SUPPORT GROUP NEARING EXTINCTION OF VOICES)

Cindy

 I’m happy you’ve suggested I be you at first I took it for a vampirization of energy (a modern day masquerade) like an Ali Baba’s cave full of cement receiving its notifications by way of jackhammer but you are not one of those passive aggressive people no one remembers I already possess your voice one day I’ll have access to the kingdom of Olympus through a phonetic wing 

Cindy 

Her tessitura is currently frozen in the Museum of famous voices after staying in an empty box, a tape recorder from 1972, those machines that look like safes whose inaudible cassettes I’ve kept (I remember the thin magnetic strips I would rewind with my index finger), between the forward and advance buttons we can sense the acceleration of time, “noise reduction” becomes back to the future 

Cindy 

I presented the thing to myself like that, Cindy spluttering over the translation of another Cindy with a softer voice (Cindy 2 cloned during a marathon of ectoplasms where her paranormal friends met) Cindy in two copies with one small difference that one righter of wrongs and the other ethereal singer had the idea of making a shapeless cake that looked like Cindy 2 we will never know if she force-fed it to disconcerted geese or begged for crumbs of it by the front door 

Cindy 

It is good to flee condescendence at midnight in glass slippers even if the road is muddy I didn’t force anything side B mixed with precepts and pills from another side A metallic serves as my eyelet lace for king size needles, sewing up an exorcist doll into sound and rags will do

Cindy 

Cinderella in her original cardboard box slides up under the fifth wheel of the carriage is upset she mis-steered her project this new definition of the ambiance surrounding the name Cindy amputated by two syllables paper-knife in her mouth reborn before midnight of her cinders is an oracle in immersion please provide the upkeep notice to move up in her heart when the little ghost girl curses the packaging inside herself she must be provided in addition to the survival kit with an expression like on the sly 

Cindy 

These flowers hung on the back of the waterlily I could plant them out with bluebells my story lends to it half-witch half-sparkling orangeade with a bronze-colored stamp that vacuum-packs you but being there to spread the fire of banalities when poem erupts something other than this other thing that you would like to remember

Cindy 

It’s me again too intense before the mirror of dolls drenched with hope they all fit into the frame they search for their reflections in vain we call a princess grown old a queen of carnage well under every relation does not look her age and the mirror turns into a paragraph

WRITING TIME (AND ON THE EXPRESSION “TO TURN THE PAGE”)

Here is the little girl folded over like a page

You open her you undress her you take her with you

You feed her with a fork you slice her 

Lengthwise

You entrust her with a page she spreads herself out and wraps herself up with the page 

You crush her by closing the book

In theory she is not dead yet she unfolds herself with words

The house of liquid sentences is her main address

A ray of light fastens itself more to the houses/voices than to the invertebrate subjects

Like an eel the little girl lets go of a cry but retrieves it

It’s poetry reduced to black powder then reworked in living dough with a little water

Each pause in a given universe gives off a mystical odor

That we extract without tweezers from a temple above time

I became aware of it – I did not become aware of it –

In sinking my heart like a fork into a fixed memory

In sucking up the features of the guests present during the final scene

Carrie Chappell is the author of Loving Tallulah Bankhead (Paris Heretics 2022) and Quarantine Daybook (Bottlecap Press 2021). Some of her recent individual poems have been published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Nashville Review, Redivider, SWIMM, and Yemassee, and her essays have previously appeared in DIAGRAM, Fanzine, New Delta Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Rupture, and Xavier Review. Each spring, she curates Verse of April. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop and is Instructor of English at Sorbonne Panthéon University.

Amanda Murphy is an Associate Professor in English and Translation Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a translator living in Paris. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle and is a member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Comparatistes (CERC). Her doctoral dissertation on multilingual, experimental writing, “Écrire, lire, traduire entre les langues: défis et pratiques de la poétique multilingue”, will be published in 2023 by Classiques Garnier.