recovery room II
you cannot only silence in the sluices
sanitary purgatorrents nourishing you
ach had i never been in the recovery room
numb beached teetering in that white
boat tethered next to other boats—ok
that’s the last harbor that’s the clammy
sleepcanal with black nurses who line
the shore as tribunal and threaten you
with stricter fingerspritzes: drip and
devil can you hear me dear—and hear
you cannot only silence in the sluices
sanitary purgatorrents nourishing you
dropwise from a tube—when under
your bed the sea’s swift beats seize
you back into the dream of star and
and gag far from 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)
