to break what would face you

I've had a quick internet wander after reading Jennifer Kronovet's work in the anthology women: poetry: migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, 2017.  [JK: born New York, lived in Guangzhou at the time of the anthology, subsequently Berlin.] It contains five of her sonnets about fighting (she is a martial arts enthusiast). This one is the third:

3. Choke

Here and here: weakness. Go behind

to break what would face you. Here:

weakness that is the human form. Here:

my weakness that is me choking

on what I want to feel: a safe distance

from my life. The children. Here:

the points that can break a person down

into pain. I can point out my weakness

because you can't use it. It merely blurs

me into a high-pitched slow rot

I can only quiet when fighting. 

I can take another's body from behind

as nothing. I can calculate myself. Use

weakness to choke weakness out. 

*

Apart from her own poetry Kronovet has co-translated Liu Xia from Chinese and Celia Dropkin from Yiddish. [For details of all this, see https://www.jenniferkronovet.com/ .]

Some years after the former book was published she got to know Liu Xia in Berlin. Liu Xia had finally been released from house imprisonment by the Chinese authorities, following the death of her husband, the activist Dr Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. [The house arrest began because the Chinese authorities didn't want her to attend the ceremony in Oslo in her husband's place.] Kronovet has written a beautiful account of this later acquaintance with a woman previously known only through her poems. 

https://poetrysociety.org/features/visiting-poet/visiting-poet-jennifer-kronovet-on-liu-xia

Here's one of the three Liu Xia poems quoted in that article. 

Shadow

                         -- for Xiaobo

One morning as I was sleeping,

a shadow hovered over me like a dream.

This shadow still blocks my vision.

Time goes by, seasons change,

but that long, cruel morning

hasn’t ended.

A chair and a pipe

wait for you in vain.

No one sees you walking down the street.

In your eyes, a bird is flying,

green fruit hangs from a tree without leaves—

since that morning, the fruit refuses

to ripen in the fall.

A woman with burning eyes

starts writing day and night

with endless dream-words

while the bird

in the mirror falls into a deep sleep.

                                 4/1997

(Liu Xia, translation by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern [Kronovet]. Her husband was serving his second stint in a labour re-education camp.)

*

Celia Dropkin (1887 - 1956) was born in Belarus and her earliest poems were in Russian, but after emigrating to New York in around 1910 she wrote in Yiddish. Here's one of her direct, explicit poems:

Adam

Spoiled,

you had been fussed over

by many women’s hands

when I came across you,

young Adam. And before I pressed

my lips to you

you pleaded, your face paler

and more gentle

than the gentlest lily:

Don’t bite, don’t bite.

I saw that teethmarks covered

your entire body. Trembling,

I bit into you—you breathed

over me through thin nostrils

and edged up to me

like the hot horizon to a field.

[Poem source: https://jacket2.org/commentary/celia-dropkin-her-white-wake-selected-poems-celia-dropkin . Translation by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet and Samuel Solomon.]

*

I can't resist quoting another of Jennifer Kronovet's own poems. This is one (of several apparently) meditating on Peacock Island (Pfaueninsel) in Berlin. 

Peacock Island

From the island

he saw the castle

 

and from the castle

he saw the island.

 

Some people live

this way—wife/

 

mistress/wife/mistress.

But this story isn’t

 

the one I’m telling.

From the island

 

he saw the castle

and that made him

 

distant from power

and from the castle

 

he saw the island

and that made him distant

 

from imagining

what power can do.

 

The story I’m telling is

the war coming.

 

How can you go from

island to castle to island

 

to castle and not give

birth to a war? No.

 

I still can’t explain it.

[Poem source: https://poets.org/poem/peacock-island .]