stick a pin in yr backbonehavent u noticedchapell hill hasnt got its own passaiclook at its spine:a spine-tingling web of fronts running thru shop-windowscaribbean curry & parota shops, pawnshoppes selling prototypes ofshark burgerspickled, shredded, chili-ed hengstenberg rotessa apfelrotkohl!theres sweet in bitterness, as alwaystry an earthen-jarred kimchi buried six feet underin the north korean borderu want a range life?summer babes do handstands on joburg beachesopen bar topspiña coladas spiked with antiseptic hand soap?youre crazed!safari now, settle down neverthe green hills of africa have gone panic-strickena lone olive tree stands at the pink edge of a mozambique desertprojet pour la protection des animaux sauvages?les hommes u mean?“Tsvangirai withdraws his party from election sayingto continue would cost supporters’ lives”gokil, thats what i meanat UC San Diego then NYUu did yr post-grad on film activismgot yr indonesian late ’80s horror flicks’ fix from mondo macabrolady terminator v. jaka sembungbawa golok gak nyambungstarálfur!uve seen them? how did u stop yr heartfrom stop-beating?stop beating, stop breathinbreathe in for me howcut yr hair and dont get a jobpretend u never goto grad schoolim bored at Lamont and everywhere elseGonville and Caius, Magdalene, All Soulscoz white men got no soulthats how we got UB40all u ever wantedwas to be my spine
Chapel Hill
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© Mikael Johani, from Mongrel Kampung (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
Mikael Johani’s latest book of poetry, Mongrel Kampung (2024), is published by Ugly Duckling Presse. His poems, essays, and translations have been published in other people’s windows: new writing across the Asia-Pacific, to let the light in, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Book of Jakarta, On Relationships, The Johannesburg Review of Books, AJAR, Vice, and others. He was a writer-in-residence in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) programme in 2022. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he organizes the monthly spoken word night Paviliun Puisi.
The poems of Mikael Johani’s second collection Mongrel Kampung are mixed, mutated utterances of a heteroglossic headspace, a home at once familiar and foreign, backwards and forwards, I and another. Sometimes a poem is in English but refers to a world in which English is never spoken. It may contain a phrase in Javanese or Greek or Arabic or Aussie, but is intended for an audience who will never understand what it means. It may retell a dialogue in multiple languages, but in the poet’s hands all languages blur into one language. These poems are translingual mini-tomes—tirades, historiographic treatises, love letters, protest songs, errant tweet threads. The spritz, spritz of cosmopolitan intimacies sprayed from an heirloom perfume atomizer beside an open sewer. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus cap tikus.
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