Your Mother Comes Back As Your Driver, 2015
Navine G. Khan-Dossos & Quinn Latimer

Photos: Yiannis Hadjiaslanis

 

Your Mother Comes Back as Your Driver, or Scene in Yellow and Silver

Do not take the mountains personally /
They are only mountains /
They offer nothing /

Do not consider the sea a thing /
You own because of your childhood /
It is only water /

Consider the community you emerged from /
And which you disowned, and fled, and fear /
A community /

You watch their lives, as from a great distance /
Pass on monitors. You click through their /
Images. They hurt you /

Families that are still alive. Your family /
Does not live, it stands alone /
Cornered /

Feeling itself a failure, or singular /
Feeling itself – what – a failure /
Or singular, feeling some sovereignty /

You watch the city from a taxi, stuck in a demonstration /
Feeling yourself a failure, or some thing /
Shhh, says your driver /

I know a lake with lithium in its waters /
I know a lake /
She says, of lithium and daughters /

Quinn Latimer 2015

Quinn Latimer is the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012), which won the
American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing,
2013). She is based in Basel and Athens, where she is Editor in Chief of Publications for Documenta
14.