Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether

 

GLOSSOLALIA

the bees are dying—can you feel it? i want
to press my tongue gently against green mesh i want
to bite softly into a sponge of any color i want
to rip & chew & spit that sponge bit out of my mouth
when it becomes small & hard & no longer satisfying the rose
is a rat the rat is a rose
saturn is rising in the 8^th house

Self-described on the back cover as a “hallucinatory debut” by Swedish-American and Stockholm-based artist-poet Maria Hardin is Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (Notre Dame IN: Action Books, 2024), a collection of sharp scalpel cuts through the short lyric. Hardin writes dreamscapes and dream scrapes, playfully quick, goth and gestural, savage and sketched. She writes with a swagger, minimal and explosive; her poems might be short, but she manages to physically pull the lyric apart, piece by piece, whether dismantling lines or words or all of the above simultaneously. “abstracting this girl / self follows me to iDeath,” she writes, to open the short poem “HEART OF LIGHT,” a reference most likely citing ease and possibility, and not, say, the post-apocalyptic commune setting “iDEATH” from the late Richard Brautigan’s classic novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968). “an exquisite corpse / trembling in narrative,” she writes in the poem “NAISSANCE DIARY,” “i / unwrite my body / x / x [.]” Her sketches are less point form or density than the achievement of hammering lines and lyrics until they actually shatter.