CODEX BORGIA 

 This recording filters the voice of the poet through Google Translate and the Armenian language.

Potatoes blind but not deaf
carrots deaf, and corn deaf from naming.
Like an onion, I eat a whole onion.
An onion on a chair in the butter, an oath
an oat, I have an oat in Venice
and salt loses its flavour.
What will season the sea?

I put myself on a rock.
The rains descended, the floods came
and the winds blew and beat on that rock
and I did not fall, I was found on the rock
rubbing salt off the rock
I licked the rock
to taste if it was really salt
and, like Merlin, learned German
and so I kissed the rock, to thank it
and something else rubbed off
into my mouth, a word: haus.

I sit up, I sit at the table.
I put my elbows on the table.
I put my head on the table
and hear spatulas scrape
the bottom of the wok, the world.
I get up. The sea is a cave.
A seacave, during an ice age.
An ice cave. Icicle, thee ice-creams cometh.
Open your hand, so that I can be a hand
and so the whole world can be a hand
so the animals can be hands
the horse, a hand
the worm, a hand
a ham, an old hand
the fly, a hand, the tomato, a hand
and even the onion, a hand
and the sky, a whole little hand in orbit.

ROOM.1208 

This recording filters the voice of the poet through Google Translate and the Polish language, though many oddities and elisions have occurred as a result.

Pigeons somewhere above me
Wings flap below me
I—half
You—half
A part of you always unseen
And me, held in a hand
A handprint on the window

I go to the bathroom
Where everyone is full
Everyone is fine
Everyone’s a finger
Has a finger, just one
To rub on my mirror
—Our mirror
Someone whispers somewhere
Farther back in the bathroom mirror

My mouth creaks
A door grins wide

Pick up your eyes
See as others see
See how the closet is not connected
But the bed
The bed is not like anything in the mirror
It is not like the same thing that has a mirror
It is on top, a wall surrounds it
And two l-shaped things, legs
One and another
Hidden by the other

A hedge eating apples
The mouth of a river ripped by a propeller

Tied by butter, my toes to toast
A toast to the toast
Talk about toast in it, about the loaf in it
About a word with a sword, sword
And how my house, unfortunately, is a house
The floor, fortunately, where the spoons live
The hypotenuse and its shoulders in the oven
One by one of them bursting from the door
I have a front
I tie it around you
It itches
Inside, a lung
A stomach a spleen
A bean a bean not a thumb
A bean now to date
To date now now and date
And the date

What came first on this date, a whale at first
What came first, whale the first
What comes first, whale first
Whales and all that move in the waters

Natalia Panzer’s first chapbook Missing Chicken was published by Cooperative Editions in 2013. New work is forthcoming in the first issue of Cookcook magazine (release date TBD). In late 2014, she came up with the term gastro-poetics to help explain her interest in the intersection between food, the service economy, consumption, and art. She blogs about poetry at Queen Mob’s Tea House as Natalia, Texas. Tweet @tunameltdeluxe.

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