when trees get cancer
Translated by Mirza Purić
such is the day
the sun has all but let itself in
the water is boiling start the powdered sesame
a small coniferous forest has been burnt with a cigarette butt
he left it on the table
for me to see
the matchbox
pensioners, do not gather plastic
the sun wants to lift it up into itself
blood must be swooshing in the toilet bowl
can you hear our country cracking
like pine trees in the white cold
a prefab home in the meadow a private cash machine
a car park and a
recycling skip with a lock and key to keep
them safe and happy and fat
in the meadow homes they don’t eat french toast
made of stale bread and water
because white bread fragrant bread bread
sprinkled with organic sesame
they can afford
editors to bake them up some poetry
a planetary electoral commission for the gathering of plastic
the strongest condemnation of empathy
big european brother
their interpretative standard a magical golden greasy
oil for the body for the face for the hair
bee bop cannot save their bad days
I hope up there where we’ll all end up isn’t so bad after all
and that the river rocks you gently into miles’s kind of blue
and that my nan isn’t shelling peas for dinners
grandpa isn’t dying of a heart attack just before cardio screening
and dad isn’t smoking his drinas at all and
isn’t crying as he cleans their carpets
because mum little sister and I are lost in škofja loka
and I hope that up there nobody rhymes their dad with had and sad and
things have gone bad
a documentary on a ganzfeld experiment
if I close my eyes as many times as eyes already shut can be
closed
I’ll crackle with inhabitable darkness
I’ll put my fist into the wet blender
and I won’t be able to get it out
at first I’ll sit into a circle of salt
impersonating a small dolphin
whose heart set in sponge hurts from laughing
organs have stalks to carry them by
he pierced his spleen’s eyebrow
I’ve got out of the habit of thinking of you
and her pretty françoise hardy face
goldfish slam their bodies on the concrete
a jellyfish billows below the raincoat
one should cough out the sorrow
I’ll shiver tucked into a t-shirt thinking I’ve been
abducted by aliens
elephants sometimes walk in line trunk to tail
when you’re nothing to no one
you curl up into a hedgehog
or a yoghurt cup
your face itches as you cry
and on those two occasions when he decided to embrace
the hazelnut and albitia in you
you are an off-white parallax
a paperlip pierced by a pair of compasses
in your left nostril an indian boatlet
in your fingernail telecom waste
do you think daylight has sound?
lash off the saffron with a slender stick
saffronise the world
send me the hoof
Mirza Purić is a literary translator, most recently of Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure (Istros Books, 2019) and, in co-translation with Ellen Elias Bursać, of Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah (forthcoming , Archipelago Books). His work has appeared in Agni, Asymptote, EuropeNow, H.O.W. (online) and elsewhere.