from subsong

Ulrike Draesner


journey of the infant as a flowering ball
around half the earth

in the forest everything was one
from the meadows the white mist rose
wondrous a        cat that lived only
in her hand.        she had dreamed
of magnetic resonance        or invented proteins
was three years old and loved
a stick that served as her mother
Sumudu in the forest
with the penguin        white-black
flapping wings        she paid attention to
the differences        the minute
movements of mouths that everywhere
happened        now to her        the human face
once seemed but a mirror        shimmering thin
vulnerable
                                 brilliant
(what?)
the birds
from the realm beyond speech
oh how she slept
after landing
in the buggy
dragged a foot on the ground
stroked the strange soil
fearing flowering
almost





wolf

a gray-skinned child long hair dark the brown face smeared with white
small, frail in loose clothing a gray fleece gray trousers
tight walking shoes a wolf-child, in her manner broad-shouldered
down the few steps of the bus a small being still
after a three-day kindergarten trip smelling of sheep, earth, donkey
as if speechless in herself with a wild predatory look
she came for a couple of seconds foreign to me
down the steps of the bus the few steps one
whole world down after three days so foreign to me. we had to
look again back to where we were we drive towards each other
the tenacious self-binding ideas
manifested as our interlinked arms, hands
when i, supporting her on my arm, stirred her more deeply
she said "ow" as if i had a bearded face
as if my wolfish beard had grazed her
my wolfish look.

i had stalked you for so long
i stroke 





i ever i ever

one gifted nag . . . he maintained TOP
OFFER "payments" for me: said "calm
down" "stand on" flexible
he rode tamed sybils healed
and advised. charisma spawned only
by generating RED-HOT CASH
COWS: silky wedding rings foldable
hor . . . horses. my seven-year-old daughter
had the horse-spleen whereas i
couldn't tell apart the hosiannahs
of hoofed animals. they were long-maned stayed
on the market like word-and-deed riddles
like the sideways push of a mouth
from embarrassment from nights of teeth-gnashing.
                                    were now likely
aging female nags. always feeling nasty becoming
more sensitive receding gums exposed
tooth-necks. the charlatan takes the money runs
flushed purple as a 500 note. obviously
a shyster my daughter says a horse
taken at face value is essentially
a metabolic prince.

frayed i bowed my head.
momentarily in a tizzy
a short piece

my daughter, so-called
filly, says: come! i'll
first clean this hump for you
then you have to
get over it



tenderest gesture
i ever i ever


translated from the German by Bernadette Geyer



Click here for Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, from the Summer 2023 issue.

Read the original in German

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Ulrike Draesner (b. 1962, Munich, Germany) is a poet and writer of long and short fiction, and cultural essays. She has published six major poetry collections, seven novels, two of which were nominated for the German Book Prize, three collections of stories and two collections of essays. Draesner has received numerous literary prizes, most recently the Gertrud Kolmar Prize for Poetry (2019), the LiteraTour Nord Prize for fiction (2020), the Bavarian Book Prize (2020), the German Prize for Nature Writing (2020), and the Großer Preis des Deutschen Literaturfonds (2021). She has been awarded poetic readerships at German and international universities. Draesner was poet in residence at the University of Oxford from 2015–2017; in 2018 she was appointed Professor for Creative Writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig, and taught German Literature and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in the United States in 2022. She is a member of PEN, the Berlin Academy of Arts and the German Academy of Language and Poetry. Visit her website here.

Bernadette Geyer is a freelance writer, editor, and translator, living in Berlin, Germany. She is the author of the poetry collection The Scabbard of Her Throat (The Word Works, 2013) and recipient of a Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County (Virginia, USA). Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Oxford American, The Paris-American, Poet Lore, and on Verse Daily. Geyer leads online workshops on poetry, as well as on social media for writers. Her website can be found here and she blogs occasionally here.