“This poem is a result of the 2014 – 2015 project of Michèle Provost called Roman Feuilleton. She derived a surrealist text by alphabetizing lines from four of Québec’s literary landmarks: Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, Michel Tremblay’s La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte, Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés, and Marie-Claire Blais’s Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. She then made comics, fabric art, objects, and new texts with the result. She translated all the texts to English.
“A few writers were invited to participate in responding to her texts in either or both languages. My results further spun off into two chapbooks, Please Don’t Tickle the Salamander’s Belly (in/words, 2015) and Ongoing Lack of Spontaneous Combustion (words(on)pages, 2016), as well as a short story which found publication. My eventual results was a manuscript called Megafauna, which is made of poems derived from iterations of machine translations (Bing, Google, and Babblefish) and homophonic translations. The sought semantic drift was also aided by autoincorrect and Apple dictation software for messing with the texte originale. All this was then poured back towards narrative.”
stumbled within bed, still clumsy with fatigue
my green caterpillar feet tangled in sheets.
the gargoyle of fine motor skills broke
free of the frame and my tail-fork ran full tilt
into my own shiny nose. compound eyes leaned
on the jamb of the bathroom mirror, itched
in a skin like a ground cherry so I wiped
and a skylight opened and sun cast my face
in sharp shadows. edges blurred so I rubbed
the tomatillo-skin, tugged it free of tear ducts.
parachutes away. glossy greens rolls. whoah.
I have two ear canals more than before.
four tympanum outies whirred, withdrew
I put a whiskery finger in and gems came out:
jade, amber, and tiger’s eye and something
that looks most like a balled fruit fly wing.
isn’t iridescent the best colour. a drip
and cream streamed. a third nipple between
was a baby and I knew it had wet its diapers.
careful not to dislodge the squalling crawling face
I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out
the tweezers and began to unbundle the bun.
