from Chauffer le dehors:
Winner of the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation

Marie-Andrée Gill (translated by Kristen Renee Miller)

 

A caress without purpose, a splicing of limbs, a dust kitten on the floor, a room closed off in fall, a scab torn off, regrown.

I lay my remains on the stove, and all my birds hide themselves away to die.

 


 

I carve the birds for supper, as I would do to you but in reverse: graft onto you articulated wings and full-throated cries, so you could see the savage flowers of my raw heart, the thousand-year medicine that envelops us.

 


 

Even if the future shrugs its shoulders and untangles its threads quietly but not quickly,  I know we will disappear to someplace other than the sky, someplace we’ve unzipped wide enough to inhabit.

 


 

It’s enough to make me disarrange the furniture, let out the cat, and lie down in wait for the mountain, taking its slow walk across the millennia, even as blow-flies blossom at last from my belly.

 


 

I touch wood; I close my mouth but I keep on
repeating to the encompassing silence:

if you are looking for me, I am home
or somewhere on Nitassinan;
all my doors and windows are open.

I’m heating the outdoors.

 


 

from Chauffer le dehors


Caresse sans objet, raboutage de membres, minou de poussière sur le plancher, champlure qu’on ferme l’automne, gale arrachée, repoussée.

Je couche mes restes sur le calorifère et mes oiseaux se cachent pour mourir.

 


 

Je pleume les oies pour souper, comme je voudrais le faire pour toi mais à l’envers : te greffer des ailes qui marchent et des cris plein la gorge, que tu puisses voir les fleurs sauvages de mon cœur cru, la médecine millénaire qui nous enveloppe.

 


 

Même si le futur hausse les épaules et démêle son filage tranquillement pas vite, je sais que la disparition sera ailleurs que dans le ciel,qu’on a dézippé à grandeur pour l’habiter.

 


 

Ça fait que je change les meubles de place, je rentre le chat et guette la montagne en train de prendre sa marche sur les millénaires, même si tous les brûlots éclosent encore de mon ventre.

 


 

Je touche du bois, je ferme ma bouche mais je
continuerai quand même à le diredans les
silences de la portée :

si vous me cherchez, je suis chez nous,
ou quelque part sur Nitassinan,
toutes mes portes et mes fenêtres sont ouvertes

je chauffe le dehors.

 

To read the rest of Kristen Renee Miller's translations of Marie-Andrée Gill, purchase Gulf Coast 33.2.

 

Kristen Renee Miller’s poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Common, Guernica, and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of SPAWN (Book*hug, 2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of fellowships and awards from The American Literary Translators Association, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.