Angelus Malus
“I was a pretty girl, desirable, curvaceous,
extremely short-sighted,
alarmed easily,
stiff as if armour-plated.
Then onto me a mournful, graceless
unknown boy alighted.
He didn’t know how to loosen me,
how male and female interrelated.
He didn’t look in my direction, but at his slowly growing erection.
He got erect, and mournfully and wanly
his ten fingers harrassed me.
A blind lightning flashed,
I was engulfed by cloud.
I had become an annexed territory, occupied thinly.
A stranger had possessed me,
made me his patch,
somehow insolently proud:
like fallen snow gone black with soot; like the conqueror’s foot.”
Translated by David Hill
