Translation: José Luis Rico
from Värit (“Colors”)
Siltala, 2017
Sue, Bessie, and Lou have returned. While they were gone, the blue-stem yucca and the forest fig reminded me of the green. Now they are smoking by the kitchen window, whiffs and bodily joints whistle in the revolving air current. One of them says: “The Pasila station brazenly slams its steel frame against the spring.” Any juice is worth drinking from a goblet. Every day you should dress to impress.
Deep-sea fish, abysses, and marsh tea burst from the talk onto the table. The setting turns melancholic, lit charmingly by bolts of lightning. Bambi, who woke up late, staggers in the morning thunder. Bessie wants to tell a love story: “Drool welled up in the corner of the mouth. Because the wind blew hard, shreds and blobs of slime shot up across the face up to the forehead and drizzled in the wind. The lips swelled. The mouth’s membranes got sore and ulcerated. The uvula widened and throbbed. The tongue petrified. The mouth ulcers rendered jaw movements impossible. The stiffening of the tongue caused the neck to stiffen. The head couldn’t turn anymore. The thorax made space for the throat, which sunk all the way down to the pelvis, making a deep gash in the body.
A strained throat. It opened and closed at the pace of breath, like a self-powering respirator.” We’re speechless. We hear that Bambi, who had slept in, was back on its feet. Bambi is known for suddenly spawning rainbows and foraging on Zeitgeist shadows. Sue opens a cabinet.
Bessi wipes her eyebrows and begins to correct her golden-colored outline. She adds: “Rather a song. Lost love: my lonely gift runs along your river.” Lou gets a solid hold of his waist and answers: “If you add a violin, you’ll make it pathetic. Throw in a frayed hem, some fatal fixation, and a one-room studio.” Laughter clatters against the ceiling and hails down. It splinters our shape, opening a ripe heat built up in a windless place.
The dessert kicks in immediately. It seeps through the hefty meal and sugar-coats the mind. When coffee jumps into the mix, things find their right proportions. Bambi nibbles at its earflap. We head out to walk it in the park. Bambi goes number two at the base of a grand maple tree. From the excrement a vision appears before us: on this rainy Saturday a cigarette falls from the slackening lips of a stranger, an image of sempiternal, all-encompassing neglect.
As if a boulder on the verge of rolling down a cliff for an unspecified time just fell in an instant with no past or future. It doesn’t matter why the boulder falls and where it hits. The person is cast into their boots, they stay afoot because of them. They’re stuck in a substance up to the knees but from the thighs on up they flutter like a tepid mirage. The Stetson bobbles on top of the mirage, tough cherry, uh?
Bessie collapses to the ground despite her full stomach. She says: “The plastic palm trees wobble in the Helsinki rain. The whale-shaped building is dilapidated, the paint chips off. A rod goes through her gaze horizontally. Or is it just a dash. She ends up fashioning a bun out of water: sheer poverty. When a person breaks away from a person, the hospital bedsheet hovers aloft, in search of its landing spot.” I answer: “You are projecting.”
Bambi continues its journey; we are by ourselves. After the storm we know the flower blossoms, the kind of flower that only buds after the storm.
from Kolkka
Siltala, 2019 (p.131-132)
The performative gender binary and frozen Karelian pies crack in the toaster.
The fear that your tongue won’t fit in your own mouth.
The distant sound of an orchestra carries from the shore.
X looks around and realizes that the entire time we were one big network, when mosquitoes, sewers, and planets are accounted for.
Y says: “When I was a kid I wasn’t seen.”
Dark and glossy, with a bumpy surface, full with small bare-winged bugs. The gazing pupil’s light bounces off the wings, colors. I can’t name this sand, it’s a little damp, it hasn’t rained, it feels odd, just like this night, the universe.
Heat from within.
The bottom as dull as paper.
The bottom of what?
Can the nameless world be captured?
Are all concepts to be believed? That they really point at something and exhaust it?
How to name this selfness, that isn’t mind nor feeling?
Maria Matinmikko is an award-winning poet and prose writer. Their first works Valkoinen (2012), Musta (2013) and Värit (2017) form a fictional trilogy. The latest is Kolkka (2019), a phantasmatic, philosophical and feminist poetry-novel. Matinmikko is a member of the Mahdollisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (Potencial Literature Society), a writers’ collective that authored Ihmiskokeita (2016). Matinmikko also participated in the digital piece Lähes tunnistamaton mahdollisuus menettää (2018). Matinmikko’s work straddles genres, combining poetic, philosophical and social thinking in different arrangements. She completed a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Helsinki, majoring in aesthetics.
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