Writing Sample: Tiny Deaths

Tiny deaths

Unbearable sultriness urges loud breaths

sleeping in the same room

angst heavier than the air

fills out the space like carbon dioxide

and we suffocate in the nightmare

in father’s dream emptiness proliferates

like potato bugs

until they’ve completely destroyed the crops

at times he coughs

like a cat trying to cough up

a ball of fur

brother grinds his teeth

mother is motionless

her lips pressed

alike our lady’s in the painting she prays to

now and then i lean over her face

to check if she’s breathing

i listen and

as we are outgrowing our already tight shoes

as our hair is growing darker

and our cartilage erodes as we run

the atmosphere outside combusts

and the child bodies in us burn

like birthday candles

so rapid that in the morning we

do not remember

Translated by Marina Veverec

 

Rabbit deaths

we stored death into animals with care

feeding them freshly cut grass and hay

and then drew the same death out of them painlessly

one incision under the neck

rabbit fur always hung from the old walnut tree

like an oversized coat

and next to the fur suit

the muscles we stripped bare

gazed at us in shame

and swayed in the gusts of wind

my father’s stiff body mother

found by the rabbit hutch

one september morning

thus suspecting the axiom

we are rarely aware of

the death we feed to others

sometimes by chance

comes back into ourselves

Translated by Marina Veverec

Hunt

We had to wait for the light to transform

into a mass inside of the womb, for cruelty to turn

into birth

so that the afforestation of Borneo could begin

You often plunge your face into the grieving stumps

and I know that you’re asking me

if there is any sense in

forcing someone to survive in this world

here and now

Mother said

When the milk starts to scream

you must remain brave and silent like a felled tree

She said that the body is porous

and you should not mind

if you recognize the designs on the kitchen tablecloth

in the chambers of your heart

A bad mother bears the genetic mutation of solicitude

A bad mother sometimes gives birth to a good mother

Other women said

your feet would grow bigger,

but from words,

not from giving birth

Outside my belly they are studying my measurements

A public dance of dandruff,

the evergreens displayed above their lips,

I’m cutting up

autumn in thirds,

puffing a firm skeleton into my belly

just like a glass-blower

creating a stable armature

They observe me stroking my belly

in my mother tongue

baby talking to a beech, a wolf and a nettle

who surreptitiously

hurl themselves down

into a single being

Translated by Damir Šodan

Statement on Caution

I leave so much unspoken

Stooped and scared, invisible, indivisible,

naming stones after the first people,

telling the silences apart,

for years I’ve addressed

every pain by the same name

Since my conception I’d been a silent body of subsistence

In the summer, you poured a river to pull me by the foot

In autumn, I already spoke to the surface of our flat

Thus we’ve become the bread rising in the oven,

the dust under the kitchen cabinet,

after hurtful words, a shrewd place of silence

Here, we force not one thing open

not a jar, not a letter, not an eye

Wrapped in wistfulness, we smear SPF fifty over our skin

to keep this abrupt enchantment from scorching,

observing the salty stillness as it rests on our hairs

Here, we force not one thing open

not the doors, not the windows, not the mouth

You’ll keep quiet for long

Dressed up as me

Collecting photons in the uncombed hair

Translated by Marina Veverec