WHAT DO WOMEN DO ON SUNDAY?



by Monika Rinck





by the way, i'm developing a malevolent streak.

this no longer effects you. but it does effect me.

i find myself run through by different ages.

nothing at all bothers me in any one of them.

so i see everything as it is. outlines.

mentally drained, sodden with poison, with honey.

fidgety with rage and devotion. no one understands.

only women understand. women are good.

women are very good, even. women are

also very beautiful. women have beautiful souls.

women wear beautiful shoes. women

will always speak to me. women remain

even when they go abroad. women are there.

i sense in women a growing disposition

to violence. women expand without end

and beyond. we upload photos of our pussies.

it's ceasing to matter. what's taken, what's given.

it doesn't add up. writing. sending.

keeping going. screaming. not being comprehensible.

at the land's end of empathy. we're through.

meanwhile, my dreams are becoming more realistic:

the day's residues persist. they assert

themselves continually, even if the contents change.

in one dream you were here in berlin, there was a beer tent,

there were folding benches, and i punched you in the chest,

you fell over, and then i kicked your bag,

several times, with hideous verve. and you said, stop it,

it's not because of you i'm here. and then there were

people nodding agreement from across the table,

that's right, they said. he's not here because of you. now stop it.

and in the dream it seemed such a waste of good rage.

but you were younger and you looked like joseph the baptist.

in yesterday's dream, black-haired people had red hair

and high cheeks, copper fuzz everywhere, and veins

behind, flushed, but they were and remained black-haired.

helpless applause. in the audience, _despair_ is unleashed,

self-image trampled underfoot, amid shouts

and faked sexual jerking. all very hands-on.

wounds are worn as brooches. we make holes

where none were and we want to go in there with our dicks.

all this is documented, the stenographers wear hooks

to which something could be fixed, if there were something.

later, it rains confetti and astroturf. then we go home

and sit at the window as if romance still existed.

and all that on just one single sunday. that's what

women do. just goes to show, huh? AND NOW YOU !!!!







--Translated from the German by Nicholas Grindell

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from to refrain from embracing