Written by Daniel Borzutzky 
Art by Siamak Pourjabbar 

Published 1/10/2014

Art by Siamak Pourjabbar 

The children are in a field with balls and trees and flowers. Or they are in a room painted pastel colors and scattered with bright rugs and miniature tables.  In the dream song the corpses fall from the mouths of the children. A young boy touches a dead hand and says: this sea horse, this crustacean, this dangling limb is the dangling limb of a body I once knew, when I lived in some other hole, in some other country where the corpses were ghosts who couldn’t stop making love to each other.

This dream song has a good rhythm and when I hear it I feel like suffocating my neighbor, like putting a pillow over his old lubricated head and watching him transition from one world into another.

Refrain:

This is just like the time you carved my fist into the globe. Right through the old Soviet Union. You trapped my knuckles in there and pulled the globe up and down and up and down until finally the sharp edges of the severed globe pierced into my skin and my hand bled over oceans and continents.

There is no other world inside of this world, you sing.

Across the world they jam bodies into globes, you sing.

We hear them when we are hungry.

We hear them when we put our ears to the hearts of our lovers. Our hearts that are filled with evidence of just how frozen we are, in our hearts.

Our hearts that beat life into our ruined, molding bodies, pumping blood and breath into the whispering absence of our remains.

 
 
 

Daniel Borzutzky's books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, forthcoming); The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007); and Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). His poetry translations include include Raúl Zurita's Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl(Action Books, 2008), among others. His chapbooks include Data-Bodies (Green Lantern, 2013); Memos for the Rotten Carcass Economy (Insert Press, 2014);One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad, 2009); and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull, 2007). His writing has been anthologized in Telephone Books Anthology of English-to-English Translations of Shakespeare Sonnets; La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA;Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else; A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. His writing has been translated into Spanish, French, Bulgarian, and Turkish. His work has been recognized by grants from the PEN American Center and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Chicago. 
(Updated Sep. 2013)

Born in 1976, Siamak Pourjabbar is Creative Manager at Eshareh Advertising Agency and a member of the Iranian Graphic Designers Society. He has participated in several international exhibitions including the Hong Kong International Poster Triennial (2010) and the Chicago International Poster Biennial (2010). He has won a number of national and international prizes including second prize at “4th Block,” the 7th International Triennial of Eco-Posters, Kharkov, Ukraine (2009), and prize for Poster for Tomorrow, Freedom of Expression (2009). 
(Updated Sep. 2013)