Jean D’Amérique
trans. by Conor Bracken
Scorched Field
The scorched field speaks
Music before the machines and the sky asleep in my head, I was a country for birds. I wandered, childhood spread out against the grass like a solar fan, the trees my radiant speech and the river my glass language. Then, the days pressed into cement, my tongue dried into a bone and my mouth plugged with concrete into a chisel beaten by stone: in my mind-forest, flayed, no fruit to braid the wind.
My wishes sand the disaster—I resist because dreams are brother to fire of the possible. If I have any life to speak of, it is not the wall my sap or the barbed wire my manure but a fig tree that rights the capsized word, an acacia deadheading silence.
Born in Haiti in 1994, Jean D’Amérique is a poet, playwright, and novelist. He splits his time between Paris, Brussels, and Port-au-Prince. He has published several collections of poetry: Petite fleur du ghetto (Atelier Jeudi Soir); Nul chemin dans la peau que saignante étreinte (Cheyne); Atelier du silence (Cheyne); and Rhapsodie rouge (Cheyne). His first novel, Soleil à coudre, is out now from Actes Sud.
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator. He is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press) and The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center) and Jean D'Amérique's forthcoming No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse). He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives in Ohio.