from One Meter Above the Dark

Marie Lundquist

Why are you stumbling over the threshold of poetry? You who have already fallen from the back of your inherited tale. Didn’t I touch your tongue with salted hands? Didn’t I hide your ruptured speech? You could have let the silence garner in your mouth. Envied the quiver of the photographer’s hand: a pulse through the picture’s rasterized heart.



*

Acquire two voices. Both the inside and the outside voice chafed by the play of weather. Have at least one wound to administer, at least one grave to shovel over. Identify yourself with the blind reverence of the snowdrop. Bear all these not-yet-released eggs, these fetal letters that would have brought you back to your origin.



*

Never have I heard love described for what it is; a sawtooth, a torrential downpour that drives us to abandon our dwellings and walk straight toward the gutter, blinded by an artificial promise. A war breaks out, the same age as our embraces. I wake at night with my breasts taut as bowls and recall the image of your lonely face just before everything ascended into a roar of fire.



*

You are washing gravel between your photogenic hands. Everything is about us, even the circular highway around the city appears to constitute a kind of wedding certificate. I take note of the necessity to intellectualize my disappointment. The heart, pounding wildly in the body. We measured our love with a level, didn’t hear the self-destructive fluctuations. I pour salt around your body while you sleep.

translated from the Swedish by Malena Mörling

Read the original in Swedish

Listen to an excerpt of the original Swedish read by the poet:

The vantage point of Marie Lundquist’s prose poems is interior, as if spoken directly from the speaker’s thoughts. This is why the poems hold a near-dreamlike sense of time and place that is both vividly precise and intricately textured—like photographs framed by silence; or in the case of her briefest utterances, like incisions into silence. There is nothing superfluous in her poems, the way a photograph depicts precisely what is in front of the camera. The poems, while using language, both reflect on, engage, and transform language. It is like thinking about thinking and how that inevitably deepens the experience of thinking. The transformative movement of the poems is governed by an internal law. To translate Lundquist’s work, as a result, is to be deeply enriched and inspired by her astonishing linguistic transformations, as well as to contend with its emotional and dizzying internal depth. It is also to contend with the fact that Swedish words and syntax are heavier than English words and syntax, and that the texture of the language is ornately carved.

Marie Lundquist , born in Sweden in 1950, is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Formerly a librarian and a teacher, she published her first book of poems, I Walk Around Gathering Up My Garden for the Night, in 1992. The collection was published in English by Bitter Oleander Press in 2020, in Kristina Andersson Bicher’s translation. Lundqusit is also translator from the Norwegian of the work of Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse into Swedish. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Sveriges Radios Lyrikpris (2002), a stipendium from the Svenska Akademien (2007), De Nios Lyrikpris (2008), and the Aspenströmpriset (2015).

Malena Mörling is the author of two books of poetry: Ocean Avenue (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 1999) and Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Her third book, Lumina Station, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November 2026. She has published translations of work by Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer and numerous other Swedish poets. Together with Jonas Ellerström, she edited and translated The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden (Milkweed Editions, 2014). She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Dianna L. Bennett Fellowship from the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.