Ian Gwin-Lewis
Pandora's Crypts
Point d'huile.
la lois est nue.
— Aimé Césaire
Oh voices, oh symbols, glands in veils and membranes of silence, we open our second mouths to supplicate the noise of your immortals, together as well and spring, blue and green, head to toes, center in two betweens!
Hidden in the soft landscapes of the secret genesis, let us absorb your storm swallows and purging oceans, warm swarms where we diverge Pandoras, assemblies to gather inundations unspeakable, of love all mute with uncontainable emptinesses.
Have mercy on the third of an eyeblink of the unsaid siblings of Ma, Bhumih, Beluthahatchie.
Molded into fire earths perpetually travel through our unsaid siblings, we Pandoras lie concealed within stellar prehistory, enharmonic in lattices of day and night, where there are no people, no animals, not even threadbare sucking. Pandoras drunk from riverdry breasts, submerged in pithdank guts.
We Pandoras simulate technology, the metal of races, caverns and craters, sacrifice the final ancestor; she must be the one who told us of me, the unlearning I who Pandoras whisperlisten, enthrall with crafts of endless returning, for a taste of her story's muddy concealment. So leaving her stomach poured into story— It is said through the canals of retreating Heliopolis the glyphs of former rivers rewrote their crossing into other cities, and the young earths' barley had begun to rot like smiles, coded into a model for the hollowing otherworld. Where sand in a pearl licked the sleepless shore one of the tongues of the earth landed, Tsvebre. Hungry she roamed the furnaces of hope, a foundling. Deathwish reeds rustled in desirous fields, smoke-deep. From the trickling of bodies along the ghostplane of sunrise, the incense of pigmeat repelled her, and yet she blended to the garments of the will, and wailed— Through red thread I weave a cradle to hide my refuge. But who would let me stay? I flood from milkweep and crack through the vessel of the dancer. Woe to you who hear these hymns to crystal suffering! Tsvebre branched through hot massacres and radiant sacntuaries and you earths deformed her coverings into the shapes of highways and buildings, branches and taproots. yet in tunnels of misery she had only been abducted, stolen through grates into the spider factory by flaming pulses quickening.
Pandoras, we divide you thus through the interaces that she faste by, we bathe you in the zenith of that kissing childage. For Tsvebre rolled from wood to stone, skies spread many grounds into burning ice, and the forsaken one with no other beheld the mottled runes running down the clay tomb where the two-headed giver had her captured. She pressed her hands into the wet reliefs of its many legs for how long breathing. The two-headed one flared her nostrils when Tsvebre scoped a portion of her arms and tried to offer her labors out of the liquid matrix which imprisoned them.
—No escape for those who enter through, intoned the two heads, withdrawing a scepter and a crown, a blanket and a bowl. Tsvebre wore these adornments out as she sunk deeper into the webs of eyelet rooms and strove to contour a house from the evening segments of her seeding crypts from their unfixed clay. Fecund matter she could merely consume as electric sphinxes, only goddesses to the unctious sphyrokapoi. Yet the many stories to the mass weaver cloaked the frigid hope of the stolen child with the decrypting of another heavenly tongue, Wivlizy, who met her in the fold where firstpaths knot. Pandoras have machined you to their misunderstanding, as Wivlizy could not sign to her unsaid sibling, just as Tsvebre could not speak with the other tongue.
And stringy mansions of the tombs still thrummed and extracted them out of replication: Wivlizy too marauded the tender surroundings for the two-headed giver. So they kept in secret from her a passage from homeburial to hearthfear, where they might lure one head as a distraction, to seduce and evade the other, and obscure the calendars of Chandragarba from those mountainous abdomens of cataracted containment. As they sculptured and dug for the giver, Tsvebre and Wivlizy each took pieces from that fierce incarnation of Demeter, deforming her on either side with their cunning supplication.
When one dug, the other piled; when one entered, the other left. So when the giver turned one head to the gift, it was there, but when the giver turned one head to the giver, she was gone. Their folds donated such a fault to erode their crypt keeper to the smallest fairybit, while tongues had taken back tongues into a volcanic chaos, a moldy lap where the two belied one another.
Yet when the two-headed giver had all but been birthed, Tsvebre took ahold of her sister, and said to her — Not my daughter! but she could not speak her tongue. And Wivlizy took ahold of her sister and said— Not my mother! but she could not speak her tongue. And she who gave everything was not given all, and she who was given all did not give everything; Oh voices, oh symbols, glands in veils and membranes of silence!
Ian Tracy Gwin-Lewis (he/they) is a writer and translator from Seattle, based in Helsinki. Specializing in Baltic languages, he has translated Andriss Kuprišs (Berlin, 2025) and the prose-poems of the Estonian decadent, Jaan Oks (1884-1918). His writing has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Presence Haiku Journal and elsewhere.