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 8th
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.
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