LEFT FREEDOM

Lisa Jeschke

LEFT FREEDOM is made up of six poems in English, translated by the author, who writes: These poems are part of a larger sequence in German under the working title of Beschreibung der FDP (Description of the Free Democratic Party). They build a universe of recursive figures (e.g. FDP party agents; robot humans as cyborg/worker-like figures of unclear genders) and ever-expanding lines and explanations. Everything is as static as the FRG and as dynamic as capitalism. The poems are trapped.

  Don’t look for me, don’t help me, don’t save me
  Don’t pick me up
  I care for my abyss, hard
  This abyss which is yours
  And I don’t long for return
  And Germany is not the universe / and there is no universe
  Am – a little robot flower?
  I’m humming from pain
  Pain
  That you only dream of.
    —from "Anonymous Well-Pruned Abyss"

300 copies printed March 2024