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LOUIS ARMAND is an Australian artist and writer living in the Czech Republic, where he teaches at Charles University. His work has appeared in various journals including Heat, Sulfur, Poetry Review, Slope, Stand and Meanjin. He is poetry editor of The Prague Revue. L'HOMME & SON DESIR "am seen & do not see" - skies fracture, emburdened - grey architectures blood shows itself - mutely dark lines spread & disperse sphinx-mouthed - when neither morning nor an empty packet of cigarettes foretells - a season of migraines PAYS DE COCAINE time stops through the ice inert as a lover's hand exhausted by pretence cut off from any gesture of denial you fade / outside is memory scarcely real a frozen island of air or suffocation or inevitability encloses in a narrow space / beguiles with et ceteras & alibis the time it takes to adjust a guilty truth in a pale reflection ... none of this matters though if you can breathe underwater like houdini / counting the seconds between impossible escapes LILITH boxes of sheet copper she keeps in the nursery a foundry of miniature nudes shapes them - heat & hammering - & welds them together so that space flows through or around them the surfaces glittering with gilt-solder NUDE DESCENDING AVERNUS midnight on the cross & cinderella shooting up she's falling apart her sibylline metonymies there's no-one inside no-one to follow through streets empty of vision just a mouth-hole to vomit yourself onto the pavement crawl stand it's only a matter of remembering how to of gathering up vitreous flesh stare out at the underworld there's always a taxi to take you back to the other side & dead eyes listing in the rearview it's not far though it's just a fairy-tale |