Mohammad Javanmard: Two Poems

Utopia

‘Third World no longer exists’

‘Internationalist; Jameson 1986’

‘Capital as a whole’

[The sound of a helicopter approaches, gets

loader, and louder, not changing for a

second, then lower, and lower

at last it,

fades

away]

‘Cognitive mapping’

‘utopian, class, and revolution’

[clapping from the next room]

‘Latin American magical realism’

[the sound of a siren from the street

louder and louder

not changing

the speaker moves her lips but I

just hear the

siren – such a bad

coincidence –

of a police, or an ambulance, or

– remembering that day on a ramp

that would go to an

underground passage

the black teenage running

a police after

him

he’s so fast

the police

breathless

‘missed the ….. at …..’ on the

walkie talkie]

‘Not comparing the

texts themselves but

the concrete situations from

which they …. ’

[noticed the Woman,

Life, Freedom, sticker

on the back of

one of the speakers’

laptops]

‘so to conclude’

‘Third World

no longer ’

[clapping arrhythmically

clapping arrhythmically

clapping arrhythmically]

--------------------------------------------------

-------------------

-For an Impossible Autumn Collection 

At nights, the thermos flask makes a
sound, fireworks glimmer in the
sky once in a while when
you say ‘firework is like a rainbow’
The wheels of the car don’t
leave behind any
traces today, YouTube ads
today to raise money, every time you
tap they apparently feed one child, if so
why not tap as much as my fingers can take
it? and what 80p is going to do for me? at the
end.

But if I scroll down, a video again     of a maybe six-year-old who has walked         carrying
her brother who might be three or four     crying     and I
don’t want to watch any
more, don’t want to watch any
more, not to look away, I’m just
    thinking of Ivan Karamazov when
    said what are we going to do with
the suffering of
let alone other
let alone                 the
let alone                 how

Who would think one
day, they’d even get used to
genocide, so that I’m writing and I
know a ‘genocide’ is happening now and I
have seen ‘genocide’ in the last year almost
every day, on the screen, before or after
breakfast/ it’s not like
it’d happened and then
we realised, all shocked by the horror and imagining what
we were doing at the same time as
that kid was         or when the dad went to         and when he         nothing but
so         he had a freshly issued     birth certificate         now

we were
watching every
morning, shedding some
tears perhaps, and putting the phone
away when you
asked, what are you watching dad, let me also
see, but no
no     when I look at you, looking at me and then                 no
how?       the mom in Gaza had written I wish if     all of us     because I don’t want my girl
to         alone         no       no
no                                                         no

                             no

the pigeons on the rooftop of the opposite                  [no]
        building     all white     they must be having some
    seeds over
there             trolleys left behind         [no]
the train passes by every seven [no]
minutes, the police makes me nervous every [no]
            time I/ tense and contracted
so he says ‘hello’ to break the tension or
just he feels sorry for my pale
face, down the road
turn right, then
open the first door on the left
take the first exist
in                        , make a u
turn, take the second
exist in/
your destination is/

sleepless dreams
dreamless sleeps
plural or not
grammatically correct or not
politically correct or not [no]

I wanted to read some Charles Olson
tonight, especially as I’m
going to Bristol and the name of a
place near there reminds
me of his Gloucester so

but no                      couldn’t
maybe it’s past its time
or mine
needs more
surplus
time/labour/money
less washing
the dishes, etc. etc. you get the
story.

Poetry now seems way more
urgent and pointless at the
same/ time weirdly so
can’t make connections between
here and there in the
text/can’t read companions to see
what you meant when referred to/
sorry Charles
maybe some other
time.

Reading Adorno about
poetry after Auschwitz
don’t understand the deduction but
I agree/ and even Celan is
a bit lyric in ‘Death
Fugue’/ it can’t be that
beautiful, there can’t be any
rhythm or imagery to
/ maybe only anti-rhythmic/ vibrations of
the body/ or shock
maybe many other imageries but
if I write them here I’ll be
contradicting     myself

‘Wa Damon Wa Damon Wa Damon’ [and blood, and blood, and blood]
‘Blood in the words’
Darwish says

even blood
is romanticised, not
painful not thick, not
from a body who                 suffers a
body with flesh a body that smells         like a human
but just a
word/ like b-l-o-o-d
it’s all an epidemic aphasia can’t p-u-t the w-o-r-d-s
together, but joking aside

the stone speaks about
a bigger truth/reality or post-
office/ not modernism here no
one can say go to
sleep
as my eyelids are.

The flask lets a bit of the captured
air out with regular intervals of
every five lines/
minimal rhythms.

The eyelids pushing down
winter is so
cold/ especially without a house in a
tent, how about no meals and no bread
how about             I don’t want to give you the
fucking news you         know better
than me and
none of us knows any
thing, but it’s getting cold here         the leaves are
crumbling making rustling sounds in dry
days, when going under

you pick it up for your autumn collection
[no].

Mohammad Javanmard is a poet and PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, exploring the lines of individual-collective relation as well as the resurgence of the past in the present, in both his poetic and academic works. He has published two poetry collections in Persian in 2020 (Seda Mi-Ayad Emshab [There is a Sound Coming Tonight]) and 2024 (Hame-ye Shahrivar-ha [All Septembers]). He has also written on contemporary and modern Persian poetry, including a forthcoming monograph in Persian, Form as History: On Contemporary Persian Poetry from the Rupture to Revolution.