Salt Bride

Ilona Martonfi

• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771337021
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Les femmes dans la poésie

The poems in this collection are sculpted like carnallite crystals and come together as elegiac meditations, drawing on history, and on mythology. Beauty and pathos are wound in a tangle of exile, and find a home. Offering free verse, prose poems, haibun and haiku. Ilona Martonfi uses her poetry to build on her activism as a tool for achieving goals, taking a stand. The book's five sections are composed of poetry of witness, ekphrastic poems, resistance poems, erasure poems, dream poems, persona poems, elegies.

Project 1: Ice Watch Paris

Lassoed, scarred. Calving. The outer frame, space it invents

unfurling orbicular margins. Unrelenting. Birdcage elevators. Dreamed up. Eighty-eight tons icebergs harnessed from Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland; glacier obelisks left to melt on Place du Panthéon: put your hand to it. Hear the sound. Rive Gauche.

Everyday life frescoes. Unfinished cast iron stairways.

Quartier Latin mausoleum, hills of the Montagne

Sainte-Geneviève, 5ème arrondissement. “Come,” they said. Decorate the chaste. Distorting. Dressed like a pauper. Toiling away in your atelier. Concealing nakedness. You have lost the key. Nearly blind. You mourn. You ought to. Your œuvre.

Sea Hedgehog

It happened here

right where you’re standing

millions of years ago

during Earth’s history

under a coral sun

aragonite rock formation

extinct genus of echinoids

clouds of eggs and sperm

postcoital beginning.

Reef knolls, yellow mud

here, here, and here

eyeless sea urchins

carpeting an algae forest

underworld of rules.

Anoxic sediments

bring testimonies of

compulsive wasting.

Rasping habits.

Warm, shallow seas.

What about it? Is it all over?

Limestone bedding

under a coral sun

gamma pictures

losing their spine and dying.

Ourselves the other

tiny beating heart.

At a Lille Pawn Shop in 1911...