Exit

Astrid Haerens

The Alm lay outside of time. Later, during the hay-harvest, when I returned from the underworld of the damp gorge, I seemed to be coming back to a land which mysteriously released me from myself.
—The Wall, Marlen Haushofer, trans. Shaun Whiteside

1.

it is something else
entirely to disappear, to bow like beach grass
excise yourself down to a single white eye

the sky red without flinching

how to straighten the fingers, touch again
the soils thorns wet tongues? 

with such bad sight, which way?
which highway, which exit to
a breath in stereograph?


 
2.

at the border between this country and the next
the beach outstretches spent

huts between cuts in the sandbar
scattered for class action

they blind-white the view, a sun robotic
burns off fog, the antibacterial frost

the foam-scattered shore
like trembling Rorschach blots

anyway, here they’ve stopped staring

since human mouths became beaks
cartilage began to grow on skin
prehistoric drawings scratched in bellies
every day another one dropped to the pavement
and people just stepped right over them

here they grow naked and free as plants
here their shameless swell and ferment
here the catch, the keeping of the last clear light


 
3.

with beach grass we braid ropes
to perimeter the shore
measure four walls with a level a pitched roof do you hear
the highway the seagulls the raging parade of wind

an elk keeps watch at the door, keeps us still

a whisper around us
lie down with all your legs

watch how the glacial sea pale as seed
closes in just before our bellies retreat

the first grasshoppers fall from the air
thud the roof

you lie on your stomach lift your right leg
put your arms above your head
the warm dark pelvis of your armpits
the warm dark pelvis of your cunt

your breathing seems okay

we build a hut
where we can go

here we’ll talk turn cartwheels draw on our skin
push the crowns of our heads into the sand like children
eat drink ourselves full

you look left to right the elk outside

I stroke your hair slow and hum

no stranger comes here
no siren erupts here
no clanging pipes no rash
accident no irony no
blushing mirror keeps you up, here


 
4.

come!

you call while lying on your back, unruly
with arms and legs crawling the air

trash piles up in a corner of the hut

is this where you can catch your breath
the seagulls are still excellent seagulls
time has no place for our hunger

I stand in the doorway and count my lovers
senators students suicides locksmiths
a photographer takes pictures
the uprising is clearly not far off

I hold my genes in my hands
let them slip through my fingers like soap
gentle them on my tongue and swallow

on the wall, I put my earliest words on view
and look at them, a zigzag exchange

language alone offers no survival, you stand behind me

even here I am startled each time abrupt you touch me

I ask the elk how much longer
but the elk has no reply


 
5.

when we’re spent
we sleep

your eyes almost touch mine
our sockets make a hole

outside, the last caked wings move slow
an icy wind blasts through the hut’s splinters

your breasts bag against my breasts
your hands stop where my backbone bends

you breathe and the ball
fills with water
you liquify

left to
lacrimal, breath, salt


 
6.

in the morning you write your name
with your tongue in the air and circling my cunt

like a beggar you sit
on my long wide back
and sail and sing

only in this hut
are we safe, far away
from stalkers infection insemination

here we can breathe
here we can take wing, bleed in peace
forget our names

you toss two coins in the air to decide once and for all
which roles we’ll play in this story

I walk to the window
the sea a plate of ice

piercing the surface
the colossal antlers of the elk

translated from the Flemish by Egan Garr

Read the original in Flemish

Listen to an excerpt read in the original Flemish by the poet:

The poems in Astrid Haerens’ Oerhert form a monograph of power over the female body, tracked from its stolen self-determination to its resurrection in the ruin of a world left with only ice to hold it. Oerhert takes this political and climactic battle to language and the line of language. The “oerhert” is the extinct Irish elk, also known as the “giant deer,” which roamed Continental Europe and died out towards the end of the Pleistocene epoch and early Holocene; the debate around its extinction centers largely between climate change and human interference. In terms of its poetics, Oerhert can be placed in the context of what poet Joyelle McSweeney termed necropastoral in a 2014 essay in Harriet at the Poetry Foundation.

Haerens calls this a book of “failures;” the poetics of Oerhert fail, and rightfully so, because in the wake of gender violence and climate catastrophe, failure is the only option. Oerhert therefore posits linguistic failure, synonymous with the impossibility of being legible in the female body, as the exact site of the resurrection of both. It is the task and challenge of the translator of Oerhert to translate these failures. The book moves disjointedly between first and second person, an anxiety of self that transfers to the reader. Internal rhyme, surrealist imagery, and the particular Dutch style of “anti-enjambment” (i.e., unpunctuated and merged syntax within a line) typify the poetics of this work. The collection closes with “Exit,” presented here, a long poem in sections which narrates a restoration or rebuilding of the body through the failure of language and the protection of a beloved against the backdrop of climate change and extinction. As the last poem, “Exit” takes the themes, symbols, and poetics found throughout the book and recasts them in a quiet, while ominous, finale.

Astrid Haerens grew up in Zwevegem in Flanders and studied at the Royal Conservatory Antwerp. She is the author of the novel Stadspanters (Urban Leopards; Uitgeverij Polis, 2017) and the poetry collection Oerhert (Elk; Atlas Contact, 2022). Oerhert won the Belgian Poetry Debut Prize in 2023 and was nominated for the 2023 Herman de Coninck Prize and C. Buddingh’ Prize. English translations of her work can be found at Versopolis, High Window, and on her album Anger’s Family Tree released in January 2024 by W.E.R.F. Records. Haerens teaches literature and writing at the Royal Conservatory Antwerp and at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound in Brussels. Haerens is currently at work on her second novel.

Egan Garr is a poet and translator from the American South. They have lived in Amsterdam since 2001, where they cofounded the small press Versal. Garr is the author of two chapbooks, Terrane (MIEL, 2015) and The Preservationist Documents (Pilot Books, 2012), and their writings on literary community have been anthologized in Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (Atticus Books, 2013). Garr translates contemporary Dutch and Flemish poetry into English, including work by Simone Atangana Bekono, Astrid Haerens, and Iduna Paalman. Garr is currently working towards a complete translation of Haerens’ Oerhert (working title: “Elk”).