I am climbing an abraded mountain. On top of this chafed mount there is a short woman who stands close to the sun. She is waiting for anyone who would be willing to fight her. She wants to fight and use her limbs and fists and show someone the hold she has. She learned defense because she wanted to be able to meet others. She lived on top of the mount because she wanted the others to come meet her.
Living on the crest wasn’t much different than living on a big big city street corner. The mornings looked the same and the sunsets were as beautiful if you thought about it and if you knew where to watch them.
She wanted to leave but sitting to watch the same sunset on the same street corner was enough to forget that she wanted to leave, until the following day.
She wanted to forget how to use punctuation and prosody so no one would think she said something wrong and she wouldn’t think she talked in the wrong voice.
Often when she sat she wondered if her mother would push the door of her flat or the restaurant next door and appear. She was terrified of knowing she wasn’t here and terrified of knowing she could be here at any moment.
The only way to stop thinking about it was to start a fracas. A fracas under the sun or sitting to watch the sun after a fracas was for her a strange relief.
So the woman did not move to the mountain but stayed on the edge of the street stairs and almost always under the sun. The sun did not move and did not leave. The people were coming and going and some violence happened. But that was it, and even when there was violence, she wouldn’t get involved. Violence wasn’t like street fights. Violence was worse, violence did not serve anything and she was aware of it.
Mother had read something she loved and loved it as much as her. It made her realize how much she loved her mother who she was terrified to see. She hoped her mother would be like the sun. Here every morning and every night, but her mother had to work and died years ago.
She thought about marriage. That marriage would be like the sun or like a perfect mother. But there wasn’t anything like a perfect mother except at times, music.
Lobster
My grandparents denied their bodies. They have anointed their knees, oiled their numbed fragmented patellas. They have walked on rubbles and gravel to climb the slope of an Occitan mount. When on French colonized islands the white man my grandfather thought they were above the law. Illegal fishing they practiced, on the same boat they would use to watch overseas. He caught lobsters in a net and threw them alive into the fire in a private creek. My dad a kid would hear them screeching and after or right before that he never ate anything that came from the sea again. Once my Grandfather swam to the great coral reef and came back with the other half of his body covered in blood. When you deny your body does that mean you deny death? I would ask him if he could hear such questions. Is that what happened to his broken rotula, and are the lobsters witnesses. In my dad’s head and his dad’s one. Am I writing that to say that I finally recognize the farmers their parents used to be? Sham catholics they never claimed any god. I suspect my grandmother calls him every day in the kitchen she calls hers, or in the dark a migraine holding her back in the hardwood bed. Hard, fine linens were successfully coerced into the family. ✦
Emma Bombail wrote and published Five Letters to Saul (Publication Studio, Paris, 2026) and High Expectations (Printer Fault Press, 2023), amongst others. She has shown her work at Nièce, Nice; Giselle’s Books, Marseille; Chess Club, Hamburg; Cocotte, Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; Shower, Seoul and Profil, Paris. She co-ran a reading series that took place in Los Angeles and across Europe, and now organizes open stages in Paris.
