Translated from the French by Pauline Levy Valensi
The essence of the world
diplodocus graze the roots of the late bao- babs twenty thousand leagues under the path of the oil tanker which ran aground in the Atlantic on the front page of Le Monde at the gas station register
Celestial supplication of the mollusk
before I produce any pearl of nacre in the shell of a mussel may the flip-flop of a bather spare me and not slap me into my o- wn pieces of shell and pulp of flesh
La vie en rose
man emerges from mud like a zombie and grills the blood of the planet which goes up in smoke over infernal cities and falls in acid rains which eat into his skin and send him back under the earth to rot
Earth is blue like a rotten lemon
after death the mind doesn't do much but all the bodies join under the surface of the Earth pressed like lemons then they rot and stink of gas and that is why the sky is all blue
Cultivate one’s garden
the seed sends a stem into the air and roots into the ground a leaf catches a ray of sunshine a branch a trunk a swing kids when you are six feet under with the truffles like an acorn
Breakfast on the milky way
spongy leftovers caught in a spiral of softened stars the expired milk plunges with the fresh water into the sink I have mushed brains and the emp- ty bottle in my hand
Perrin Langda, born in 1983, lives in Grenoble, France. His poems offer brief, often ironic pictures of everyday life. These poems are from his book Quelques microsecondes sur Terre (A Few Microseconds on Earth) which was published in 2015. Langda has published three other books of poetry, and three more are scheduled to be published by next year.
Pauline Levy Valensi‘s upcoming translation of Perrin Langda’s poetry collection, A Few Microseconds on Earth, is scheduled to be published by World Poetry Books in the fall of 2018. She is currently translating Nth Splash on the Asphalt, Langda’s collected works. She is completing her master’s degree in French language and literature at the University of Connecticut, and in general and comparative literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.
World Poetry Review 