Erwin Uhrmann
Two Poems
Translated by Ariell Cacciola


Holy Mary Spaceship

I eat my way through the strawberry layers
because of the windswept spaceship
I place myself below it
and expect its igniting blast
and I let the engine crash over my back

she says: there is a picture
I put it inside my cave and
fall asleep atop it
—in her weakened face

did she not ask me about
the sugar streaks—
Which glue to me, then the announcement:

Be frightened of the mouth, the opening
into which I slip the cargo containers
Be frightened of the nostrils
with which I slap you square in the face
I'm frightened of the Big Bad Wolf from 1938
He devours, barks like a terrier, and in the grunts
He puts his warm muzzle into your rectum

I'm frightened of the spaceship with
the young woman from the blinding rays
The beats, stabs, shines and sparkles
Grinds, rumbles, rattles

and pulls you into a strawberry field,
In Isfahan,
in Belgrade,
in San Francisco,
in Berlin

if you scream in crumpled folds
the hands tied together
fist-sized hole in the head
the concentrated red eyes

Milk bubbles froth from your mouth
half man half woman
then she's bent from the supersonic steamship
like Liz Taylor as Cleopatra

and when you snap your righteous lips shut
ruptures
clatter your nipples
in the pharynx of the rotten strawberry garden

Howls from the face of the stag
and you think of yourself
as an Apache squaw at the carnival
and if in the evening you are asleep
as the washing machine rumbles

until you see it rise up
and your hair becomes matted
dying and she looks at them
in its gliders

Mark Frechette

As the world sweeps
through its darkness
surrounded by the television thunderstorms
the crack
of light coming from behind
not from a million Kilowatts an hour

and it lays on a bay,
a perfectly placed heap
a deforested basin
in a hodgepodge

the two weeks
in which it happens
are gone as misguided birds
with retracted heads that they pull through

past a window
in the ruins of a dictatorship
the sunlit
the unprotected freedom

dozens of parts in a bursting house
and the flash of rays
through the wind
the wind cycles



Erwin Uhrmann is a writer and artist living in Vienna, where he co-founded the art club Kunstwerft. He writes articles on art for magazines and catalogues as well as works for the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria. His novels include Der lange Nachkrieg and Glauber Rocha. In collaboration with illustrator, Moussa Kone, his first book of poetry, Nocturnes, was released in 2012. Erwin's third novel, Ich bin die Zukunft was released in April 2014 by Limbus Verlag.

Ariell Cacciola is a writer based in New York City. Her articles and fiction have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Words Without Borders, Publishers Weekly, amongst others and in the Austrian publications Literatur im Museum and The Gap. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and is finishing her first novel.