POEMS

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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.

 

 

 

 

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