recovery room I
how big is your pain?—and if there were
no border in sight that might unlock us
ach had i only stayed in the recovery room
lost in dream tied to a drip feed under white
sheets near people who also never found them
selves a herd of sheep close to sleep so close
to god and solace and the giant furry nurses:
our shepherds who bent velvety over us—
to one another we seemed a number puzzle
man: on a scale from one to ten tell me
how big is your pain?—and if there were
no border in sight that might unlock us
from the depth from the postnarcotic
sniffle—we would remain so close to this
me hard to tell apart from other sheep grazing
here beside themselves in the recovery room
Uljana Wolf is a German poet and translator. She published four books of poetry in German, exploring the poetics of translation and the ever-shifting space between language, as well as numerous translations of poetry by Erín Moure, NourbeSe Philip, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Christian Hawkey, Eugene Ostashevsky, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, and others. English translations of her work appeared in four chapbooks and in Subsisters: Selected Poems, translated by Sophie Seita (Belladonna* 2017). Her latest publication is a collection of essays and talks, Etymologischer Gossip (kookbooks 2021), from which the two short pieces are included here. (Photo credit: © Villa Massimo Alberto Novelli)
