words toward ‘My Jewel Box’ by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

My Jewel Box
by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Action Books, 2022

While reading the mouth-bathed insertions as they are mid-written in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s My Jewel Box, I have this dream in a later body where I can be seen watching my veins do nothing in the same lab where it was once proven that god was buried alive. What valid surrogacy is this? As translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, it is a surrogacy of photogenic pain and pain’s plural. Of struck snake and of birth being both have and have-not. Adornment and strangling, says Olsen, says Jensen, and slowly suddenness is everywhere. I can ghost people I've never met. In this verse, in channels of otherharm, dolls dream but only if you notice. Maps are made from the worry that one’s anatomy is disappearing, not as we speak, but as we are silent. Words mean what sounds mean. I sucked on a penny as a child and my salt brain loneliness called it fruit. Are these your cow negatives? Mask loses a tooth. Mask has a cavity. In the reading, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an allowable blue thought. In the after, I’m hyperaware of time’s inability to be present. Somewhere in between, or in the during, there is a restart of an irreplaceable beginning and it is here the work makes vaccines of permission and recounts, perhaps, touch’s second chance. This is the third book in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s trilogy, with the first being Third-Millennium Heart and the second Outgoing Vessel, each of which were also translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. The body has a body it uses to find bodies. God will get his unneeded rest, I’m sure. 

~

reflection by Barton Smock