The following is an excerpt from Avasilichioaei’s Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), which also appeared in Issue 3.23 (Spring 2014): Languages. 

A voice addresses the border in an intimate questioning; the city, body, nation are superimposed; various voices respond in French, English, Romanian, making the bounds between their languages and subjects porous.

from Bound

Border, you terrify me. Border, you must dictate your own dismantling or
we will perish. Purge. Border, are you listening? Are you empire?

Our margin is a pinprick. One of us balances. We enter the idea sideways,
disjunctive, producing architectures, performing language, inscribing
intervals. The city rumbles into a future because it lacks direction.
Frequencies jam. Then our distortions wander. How do we chart this
aliveness? Of marginal weathers, limited instruction, passage inserts here.

Perhaps a meridian is what we look for. If you insist that I take sides, you
will misplace me. Instead, I take a barrier to the woods and grow confusion,
which might be a sign of health though a leader does not think so.

Border, walking along your edges, I realize that what from a distance
appears as edge is simply a faded memory. The moment unravels around
us, thought-struck. Border, as an idea, you are impossible to margin.
Border, are you listening? Are you hungry? Still hoping for empire?

We vacate the bedroom. We are an outskirt in disguise. Serrate sounding.
Sink. Tending to a voice is tending to a throat. In thinking of a tender her,
contours ripple. On the eve of the departure, hands are already parched,
mouth is already empty.

Border are you watching? Your scope tuned to an obscure gesture, your
gaze indifferent. While a rippling refrain of shots, tasers, accelerated feet
and sleepless hands rages. Border are you enraged? Are you bored? Are
you longing for the fiction of enlightenment?

Daytime obstructs our watching, though we remain vigilant.  Our
watching, itself a dismantling of boundary. Stutter, cough into. Caught.
It’s not about being on one side or the other, but about one side being the other.
Border are you nervous? Nerves? Nodes? Are you a call to network?

To cross the island of the self to the island of another. Because she shows
me how. Border does this incite you? Does your shore lust for another’s
shore? When the other encroaches and thus smalls the self. When the
other inspires and thus expands the self. Land of transpresence. Awake.

In defecting from the I’s island, its shored nationhood, my I still rations I
to I. Hybrid as a space of doubt. Or manufactured hope for future.
Resistance in being. Being in resistance. In these words, histories unfold.
Impossible to utter without attachments clamouring at the mouth. No
word is a virgin. Hybrood.Nationmood. Or is it? Immigraftion.
Immiration.

Border are you minding the native in me? Are you pinning for home? So
easily lost to distraction, fear grips. In the territory of a being, territory
accumulates. Occult incision. We grasp nomadic, beggars at the
thresholds to our own selves.

Border are you primitive? Are you primed for capital, economics, policy?
The child, pointless sandwich in hand, spends lunch hour circling the
school building. No one dares the outside to befriend her foreignness.
Nuclear threat once more in the schoolyard of leaders.

A breathing tree, a strewn sentence, a mundane alley of cement. We veer
to have nothing to say yet stubborn until the saying comes. Juncture as
meeting point and phonetic feature for distinguishing a word’s boundary.

Border, in principle, we reject your unprincipled discipline, your corrupt
yoke. In action, we are immobile, static, ineffectual. Not quite ashamed
enough to act. As such, words become unsanitary, a choreographed
arrangement of marks on screen or paper. Born virtual to expire virtual.
Virtuous, an obsolete. Border, now you see how easy it is to extricate
yourself from our façade.

Solitudes in a new arrangement. The frontier question being whether or
not I will enter the other side’s economy. Urged to declare my
participation. Anxiety that I won’t. Alien body as fiscal threat. Should I
mention that my frequent crossing is propelled by love not market?
We are exalted and broken. Search for the day’s voice. Grope, claw, paw,
finger, scratch, ink, tap. Skin bears a melodious scent. I am my fear and
my fear’s sworn enemy. Glare at the scarred, burdened words of discord.
Uncontainable. In the face of such thisness, how can the matter of any
language matter? How can it not?