Antonia Alexandra Klimenko
(France)
There–ness
No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark
Warsan Shire
When the morning paper hands you Syria
with her throat slashed
headlines dripping
with the blood of children from South Africa–
schools of flailing thrashing fish
in baskets in cardboard cradles pulled from the sea
when you read your own obituary in the Unwanted Classifieds
when your passport has expired and you’re now officially dead
when the death toll has reached you posthumously–
just ignore the front page entirely
head straight for the comics
pull up an easy chair before it too floats away
and heads for the jaws of the Unknozn
The mouths of the Innocent
are begging for mercy are longing for freedom are gasping for breath
from their own stench behind a barbed wire fence
and you give me a banal dirty look and ask me where I am from
I who have torn off my limbs who have grown gills and fins
to slip through this narrow canal through the eye of your needle
I who cross my own self every day and pray
I will make it to the other side !
Doesn’t everyone come from another place?
Doesn’t everyone want to get somewhere?
Even standing still Nothing stands still
Stars need a space to turn a space to burn for
a little grace
Even Heaven needs a place to yearn for
There are mansions in the sky
black holes in the homeless terrain
there are people who will never
know their own worth the origin of their birth
who dissolve like refuse in the ocean
who are recycled in the center of the earth
who dissolve in the rain or unfathomable emotion
becoming something else again and again
We are all in the process of becoming
something else someone new some other place
Dark shadows that once wore a human face
at the bottom of the sea and those deeper waters still
that no one can replace–
who tried to make the crossing
or whose blood spilled and left no trace
Some who waded through their own fears
who waded through their own tears
Others who learned to drink them
while still others tried to sink them
No one wants to leave a place they call home
No one wants to give up everything
At night
I dream of cities with
thousands of windows like mirrors
and children being thrown out of them–
thousands of doors opening and closing
But there are no floors on which to stand
or take refuge in a bottomless sea
with thousands of empty shoes
thousands of empty shoes
and no souls left to fill them
Every night I toss in uncertain seas uncertainties
Every night I cling to my modesty cling to my dreams like a raft
while the draft of your political wind chills to the bone
triggers terror in my eyes Where are you from? Nigger!
What would you expect me to say?–
I’m shedding old skin and the new feels like home?
I who have torn off my limbs who have grown gills and fins
to cross the sea of no return to transcend my own disguise
I who cross my own self every day and pray
I will make it to the other side !
I am my own country my own floating I-land
this side of the rainbow somewhere I do not know
I carry the sacred past in my faith for a future–
the known to the unknown the dead to the living
I’m in the business of forgiving forgiving forgiving FORGIVING!
while you retire in your easy chair
and sigh This is living
What are you afraid of? you who turn away in silence–
that I occupy a thought on the outskirts of your mind?
seek asylum in your smile? take refuge in your kindness?
Who knows…one day I may migrate to your heart
I sing songs to the Invisible as a whale or a dolphin
I sing songs of remembrance sing songs in the dark–
write poems for lost prayers in blind halls of oppression–
tortured cries of the abused haunting pleas of the unheard
How long can we live with this malignant repression–
the absurd unfairness of the privileged few
No one wants to leave a place they call home
No one wants to give up everything
One day I shall return to the sanctity of there–ness
I pray one day I won’t have to pray for you
Song of the Homeless
How long can I go on
pushing my life before me? My feet are bare and swollen– they do not know me anymore! And I haven’t yet enough hands to keep me warm
nor make a pillow for my head
Maybe I’ll grow new fingers tomorrow so they, too, can stick out like a sore thumb! I suppose you think
I should find a better place to hide
than in the poverty of my skin
Do you think I like
carrying my heart around with me in a basket?! You do not care that I have forgotten the words
to the songs I am singing– and I am running out of songs!
How could you know first-hand? that it is not my death I fear–- only that I should learn of it second hand
Heritage
Let’s put down roots, you said–
buy a house have a kid get a car
Let’s not lose anoher year
wandering like gypsies all over creation
(Mind you
this would be the same year
you planted yourself
in another woman’s garden–
the same winter
we buried you in the ground)
Let’s not, I said,
combing centuries from my hair
Let’s honor what we’ve already lost
Everything
slipped through my fingers
that year
Nothing
took root in me
only you
six feet under
I pulled my hair out
by its roots
over you–
for every secret
for every lie
for every betrayal–
one by one
I let my hair down
like a ladder
then descended into Hell
I have always gone to great lengths in my life
I never once cut my hair growing up –
It was a part of me
I wore it coiled as I would the sun
on the crown of my head
I wore it loosely entwined
with the strands of the moon
Deeply braided
in my Russian heritage
it was a magical antennae –
a conduit to energy both radiant and luminous
I could see when you were lying–
see things before they happened
And so
I parted and untangled
your deceptions–
the alibis the lullabies
the gardens you had all but ferilized–
the familiar light filtering through
the subterranean tunnels of my mind
Each tip channeling the sun
scratching at the surface of the moon
Each tip a conscious vibration
of the generations before me
I let my hair down like a ladder
and I deseended
Everything sacred
is hidden, you said
Not true not true–
though you a mathematician
would reduce me further
In your mind
I am still eclipsed
conquered powerless
buried under you
You who like Genghis Khan
ordered his slaves to wear bangs
across their seeing third-eye Below the suface of my skin–
your original sin
your root of all evil
poking fun at me even now
Once unanchored
it floated up to seek my blessing–
the aorta of consciousness
sending out its arteries–
your veins like rivers
spilling into
my fertile imagination–
just waiting for you
to take hold in me
I who let my hair down
and ascended into Heaven
Every Spring
I tear darkness
from my lips
Every Spring
one by one like weeds
my fingers descendants of earth
wither and sigh and sig into flowers
And where are you, now? I ask–
you a mathematician
wandering still in that other country
looking for the square root of one
Roots do not seek out other lands–
but grow where they are planted
multiplying like numbers
ike tears like light
unto themselves a solution
Unlike your blind equation
where centuries are lost roots find their way back
in the dark
chord in d# minor
three days of rain
of pain and painted flesh
the moan of empty rooms
and what is left but the sheeted furniture
the whistle and shuffle of bones
a broken telephone my own footsteps
how quickly they appear and disappear
those passing tones these luminous encounters
the changing unseen floating dreams
neither living or dead but waking
distant strains of miles and coltrane
the reflection of the moon on passing trains
inarticulate fingers suspended over keys
the creaking eaves that echo all is gone
what’s left of me? i’m going home
i drift from myself to major and minor
the percussion of the brushing of leaves
a wind in transition a slur of expression
i am divine imperfection
the rapture of autumn the sorrow of fall
i lie in my shadow not me at all
but the one who lives outside myself
who finishes what i’ve left undone
who sings for you and eats thin air
who reaches for nothing and finds nothing there
Abracadabra
A houseboat docked on the Saint Martin Canal
I cannot see you but I know that you are there like the sweet nostalgia of butterfly wings– the dust of memory between my fingers
Since you have gone, my friend, all the ashtrays in Paris are full all the bottles are empty a thousand crows have flown from your head into mine, clocks at the Musée d’Orsay have decided to stand still and Billie Holiday is beginning to sound a lot like Leonard Cohen
I cannot see you but I know that you are there– Biedma’s boat passing between two dreams– drawing the sky’s curtain between night and day I walk with you, surreal, along the canal– the winter moon drinking the river’s dark
Since you have gone since you and I have, now, both decided that everyone in Paris lives on the sixth floor, I wait for you at the top of my landing I wait for you in small rooms with big hearts I wait for you in all the stations of the soul that have no last metro
I wait for you at sorties Saint Germain and Saint Michel… where, split in two, old friend… you look at me…I look at you.. . Your last night in Paris still waves back to mine Walk me to the corner our steps will always rhyme
Then; you turn the corner as I turn this page
stillborn
you are always with me
even when you are not
Life’s full empty room
Breath’s bittersweet sigh
color of Nothingness
transparent as angels
color of darkness
perforated with light
color of tears
fallen from the dotted
blue blanket of Sky
you are always with me
even when you are not
suspended like the crescent moon
the alphabet of stars
the space untraveled
between us
as if
inextinguishable
presence and absence
relinquish their names
surrender themselves to the Invisible
as if
only
without holding
may we trembling feel
the infinite nearness
of our immense
aching
fragility
i marvel
at the innocence
of your tiny unopened fists
how
butterflies still
fly from your lips
how mine drown
in the drool of gurgled silence
how
even as the umbilical cord
untangles around my neck
my voice so far away
is trying to reach you–
buried so inexorably
in your muffled lullaby
i am always with you
even when i am not
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BIO
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary Tambimutttu of Poetry London–publisher of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. Although her manuscript was orphaned upon ‘Tambi’s passing, her poems and correspondence are included in his Special Collections at Northwestern University. Klimenko, a former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, is widely published; her work has appeared in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France), The Poet’s Quest for God Anthology, Counterpunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology, Occupy Poetry Anthology(in which she is distinguished as an American Poet) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the in Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
She lives in The City of Light where she is Writer/Poet in Residence at SpokenWord Paris.
https://spokenwordparis.org/writer-in-residence-antonia-alexandra-klimenko/