Translated from French by Eponine Howarth.‍

Extracts from Demande à la Brûlure by Simon Johannin (Éditions Allia, 2025).

‍I‍

Forcing myself to walk in a Spanish night
Finding neither you nor the dogs nor the stench
 of cigarettes,
I let the drink burn my throat
Sick with the inability to scream your name

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The world will go up in flames with a thief on its back,
iron heels crushing caves and mountains.

‍

Can’t you see that we’re walking on the light bulbs
of a sky so sad it’s fading away?

‍

What would it take, for the remnants of those stories
that aren’t yours to evaporate from you?

‍

I walked out with all my crevices in the open towards the call of the
night, I write a poem with my elbow screwed to the marble, whilst
in a single gesture to gather myself together, I test
everything.

‍

How many will it take, verbs lined up like boats
ready to race through our stages, diversions to
draw my heart from a foam too salty to drink.
Of dead bodies, of living bodies, without choosing under
which stars the muscle destined for this pumps their blood,
of love to burn on the altar of love, of cloisters
from which one escapes only by flying away, so that at last
the wing on my back may open, immense, fragile with these
insignificances.

‍

A whirlwind of noise and excitement, Italy makes itself at home at my
table whilst I am alone. The unbearable shrillness
of a joy that is not my own, as I watch it
pouring from their ears on the other side of the window.
These rhythms will stir in me neither boldness nor
the kind of feelings one uses to move islands.

‍

Tonight, I turn twenty.
Yet I’ve done my best to grow.

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I pay after the drink
I smoke before death
Before I write, I listen to myself

‍

I only drink alone in cafés
Where others pile up on the sacks of their laughs
I only speak to myself

‍

What does this bottle of lemon with its
alluring gaze, have of you, a vague essence, a powerful scent that
you set in motion when, as you move, the whole universe around
me shifts.

‍

Gold rings on fingers overlook the watch on
the wrist, he buys my silence with a bottle half
filled with water into which I drop the embers of my
cigarette butts, which I inhale and spit out with him.

‍

Bambino crackles in my skull when at last
peace takes hold of me, as the seeds of joyful futures
sink deep and burst in my mouth.

‍

Three giant poets strut about, smoking above
my head, as his hood draws near.
I have nothing left to say since that last day of
the world silenced our conversation.

‍