Four Poems by Afrizal Malna

Eraser's Guest

It’s a shame this poem’s already been erased when
I go to read it. Like humid air that tugs
at my arm to catch what will fall, is
falling, and falls. What’s up with erasing? Glue,
scissors, and yarn make a shadow of barbed
wire. I erase the word erase from the documentation,
out from the barbed wire. Return each word
to glue, scissors, and yarn so as to
hide, lose, and erase once again
the word erase. And a knock
that’s never been erased inside a shadow’s
death: a guest from a door’s shadow that’s never
knocked on the door.

The guest suspects I don’t have a chair to
die in if I don’t have a floor to live on. Waiting.
Waited on. Plans at 7 p.m. They serve the word
eraser from a bookstore to their guests,
like a shadow that’ll slip away from its light.
You’re my guest who I wait for from the mistake
of typing the word erase in a story about
a brilliant morning and birds in flight
drifting away erasing their own chirps.

You don’t have another chance to tidy what no
longer can be erased, after this poem. An eraser
makes five o’clock in the evening. Comes through till its
vacancy can no longer be seen.


Techniques to Entertain the Viewer

The coffin’s joy in saying happy new year.
I mean, coffin and new year.
Words move across it and fall like birds
shot in biology class.
Intellect, that feels it could be a mediator
between body and reality, topples from the bookshelf.
I mean, topples and bookshelf.
Period and comma lost in a period-and-comma trap.
Words subjugated by the dictionary’s storm.
Split again between storm, between dictionary.
A bossa nova in the middle of a library fire.
Split again between music and fire in the library.
“Mr. Entertainer, Sir,” I say so as to see my spirit
amongst a collection of housing costs and
football match tickets.
A wash bucket in a heap of city dwellers.
Applause of perfume producers
and a printing press from a hospital.

Thank you.
Mr. Entertainer, Sir.
Thank you.


Ears of Revoltuion

I’m faithful to you, comrade. Be faithful to me
while eating sate and losing your sate skewers. I’ll
be faithful to you, comrade. Look at my wounds,
are you faithful enough to sit and to stand? You’re faithful
to me while reminding me to sleep and drink
warm tea on Monday mornings. I see your faithfulness
like the party’s fidelity on a Sunday holiday.
Be faithful to Monday and to Sunday,
comrade. Be faithful enough to applaud before
my corpse. And scream and shout when the factory
puts out goods and commodities, trucks carry
goods and commodities, stores and shops and homes and houses
carry goods and commodities.
Be faithful when traveling between cities, announcing
changes in the price of phone minutes at every moment. Be faithful
enough to forget the smell of a nation like the smell of a thief
hiding in his own home. Comrade, do
you have the funds to steal your fidelity? Don’t
trip over your own feet. Don’t trip over your
own mouth, comrade. Don’t trip, comrade, over
your own eyes. All ears are gathering
here, comrade. Ears of revolution that
read the smell of bananas. And feel it when
your mouth, your mouth, falls to the soles of your feet.


A Street to Fall on 

You sit that plastic-wrapped heart down on my
desk chair, sit down to light up a poem. Scent of
plastic and corpse perfume. A rainy season so
warm and so January. You sit me down,
the one who’s standing on my desk chair, standing to see
what keeps falling. Toward what’s lying around
and what’s floating away. Toward what’s running after
the fall of all I don’t need to own.


Translated from the Indonesian by Daniel Owen.

Reprinted from Document Shredding Museum (World Poetry Books, 2024) with the permission of the publisher and translator. All rights reserved.