KRISTEN RENEE MILLER

Three Mistranslations

Insta-Somebody
legend or not, she’s back,
gun-slinging, thinking
she’s lost them by the hundred-
thousands, all her fawns

they haven’t gone
they’re covering the rise
crying ninety-nine,
one-hundred, legend-or-not,
here we come


          The Sanity as Perfect Object:

your haunted fauna

          The Sanity as Perfect Object:

would linger, all sign,

all signified, would linger
all year and hurt a little

          The Sanity as Anodyne:

your spectral rimshot

popping in the ribcage
would linger here and

          The Sanity in Fact:

die, die a little

 

love is cud, love drug
from the guts of god
come grief come winter
come mother, lub-lub

lub-lub, you bloated bundle
you boiled lobe you
blood bubble
la-la-la, bubba, la-la-la
and boil the ballad down

 

Sources 1&2: Moleskine 2020 Daily Planner informational brochure, German text. Source 3: “Aschenputtel” German text, traditional.

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 (2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill, and the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.