G-NT3806KSJP
︎

PHENOMENOLOGY 1.9
TEXT TO TEEN YEARS AND ELASTIC
time has an elastic quality
from childhood
into teenage years
narrating
with letters
which admit and confess
too much
and then it snaps out of my hands                                 
and lashes my eye  



It wasn’t me who burned the diaries. It was someone I once was. All the texts about my teenage years. Thick as blood. The paper congealed, red. I saved the photographs. Back then, long ago, I am sitting down by the beach to the west by the sea. My eyes looking foolishly into the camera. Always so stupid, my eyes. I see that now. Waiting for a future that ate into flesh in a completely different way than I expected.







Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger published the poem recording Mítt navn við hondskrift (‘My Name in Handwriting’) in 2014, and her first poetry collection, Hvít sól (‘White Sun) in 2015. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and teaches creative writing at the University of the Faroe Islands. The poems featured here are from her second collection Eg skrivi á vátt pappír (I Write On Wet Paper), which received the 2020 Faroese Literature Prize and was nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Brad Harmon is a writer, translator, and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. His forthcoming translations include Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Threadsuns Press, October 2024) and Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (Sublunary Editions, November 2024). He currently lives in Stockholm. bradharmon.me