Fleshless battalions go—the night patrol
Heaped mass of
Words with one face
Tripping over wires
Small scalding coils
In the little church
Of your mouth— Goodbye,
Or sparrows
TÊTE-À-TÊTE
tight hours & pity sunrises
the furniture ferns collecting
our breathless topics
—how fast the trees
are now ending in tuning forks
& the birds are mistakes
in a hard sun
you know we’re nothing more
than flesh under the eaves
E.C. Belli is a poet and translator. Her translation of I, Little Asylum, a short novel by Emmanuelle Guattari, was released by Semiotext(e) for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Nothing Bird, her translation of some selected poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd appeared with Oberlin College Press (Fall 2013). She is the recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in VERSE, AGNI, Colorado Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Antioch Review, and FIELD. Work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others. A finalist for the 2016 National Poetry Series, she is the author of plein jeu (Accents Publishing, 2010) and an editor at Argos Books.
