SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Twelve
GILI HAIMOVICH
Consolation
When I'm invisible
I'm able to come nearer to myself,
looking at the insides as if through a test tube.
I'm folded in there, like a snail in its carapace,
I'm a division,
a formless entity
looking to spread, to melt into freedom
and yet be contained, embraced into belonging.
Looking into the glass test tube
I see all the places I left behind, they're furrows on me,
like an audience's empty rows of seats in the theatre.
I bow on the stage that is my chest,
and wait for the slap on my back to arrive,
for the ghosts to return,
put me back to sleep
in the cradle of romanticism.
Am I surprised when none of them show up?
My invisible self eventually leaves me as well
but I promise her that next time, when she returns,
I'll bring her a consolation prize.
Gili Haimovich is a bilingual Israeli poet and translator with a Canadian background born in Jerusalem. Her poems appear in World Literature Today, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, LRC–Literary Review of Canada, Asymptote, New Voices – Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell Publishers), 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press), Room Magazine, Drain Magazine, and Circumference. She is the author of ten poetry books, of which four were in English, including Promised Lands published by Finishing Line Press in 2020, and six in Hebrew.
