Hana Samaržija 

Translator

Aubade is a buffalo.
It unwraps its horns like a lotus,
and water is dew, strewn with a faint
twist of the neck. This mist forms a thin,
dense layer of fur that trails its spine
like a white deer trails traffic
when it is snowing.
The white petals of a lotus

or,
white blood cells, like pearl necklaces,
which hang from roofs when it turns cold.
Aubade rushes and races with its brief,
darting haste,
like the life of a white rabbit
and other white animals.

Aubade: the only part of the scene that is brown.

Everything else is white, wherever
the round rifle of the eye
beneath its thin frosty membrane
can perform the splits.
Brown is only a tree with four roots
and two branches.

I do not know why, but aubade

reminded me of the juggler,
who waits for the traffic lights
to turn green. He then hurls
dusty tennis balls,
ball by ball,
like large, smooth walnuts,
dum.
If one were to drop on the road,
it would roll beneath a car waiting for its mark
and ruin the day.
This way, make no mistake.
There is no mud on its hands.

My love is
a hunter that aims
for the empty space between two horns.

While white were reduction and the North pole,
purple was the colour of our wealth.
Since birth, we've been eating grapes,
wearing purple robes,
and, at plastic fairs, only caring for smooth,
synthetic things.

We went to restaurants in Rome
and asked them to, in plastic dishes,
serve us purple cream
that we would then carry out
and spread on the walls of hotel rooms.
We never paid for the rooms, nor for the cream.

We quickly got used to our excesses,
our small thefts and abuses
soon stopped worrying us
the way they did at the beginning.
In Rome we learned: the only real luxury
is a rare fabric

to be acquired from abroad,
where melancholic seamstresses
weave it from the tear ducts of koalas,
and young pandas.

We were still too lazy
for business endeavours
and said: if we really want to fall apart,
we'll have to breed our own suffering.
We started trying in our teenage years.

Pressing our eyelids,
we imagined the world as awful and cruel
and ourselves as alone and unprotected,
and held hands. We would sometimes try
to bite our lips.
Doing it, we would think of aubade.

Hoping to let some purple blood
that would stain a cotton bud
in melancholic, autumn wine

we each dug our thin nails
in our own large beet
and wept, facing each other's back,
as much as we could.

This morning, in my dream, I sounded
like a mechanic creature. My tone burned
in the thousand uteruses

dashing from my mouth. I woke up and
now live in an amplifier,
my window reverberates with the trucks

passing down the road. My signs are bent
like the sirens on main squares.
I stretched and sought men to bear witness:
here I am a horse-shaped sun,
living in a woolen egg.

The binds are witnesses of my desire
to creep into the veins
on the leaves of free plants. The morning is

the desire to disappear,
as if there had been no music.

I photographed a duck
that stood on a wooden trunk
to show you the duck and the trunk
or to say: there was a duck.
I spend the rest of the day applying make-up
and then watching myself,
observing myself from the distance, until I
recognize myself, and wave hello.
When I am done, I say: this is a mouth

or, this kind of mouth:
and I immerse my lips into a large pomegranate
and say Pomegranate,
there was a pomegranate,

this kind of pomegrate
and then swallow it whole.

I only appear for myself
and these acts entail storms
from a low sky of treetops,
locusts and crickets.
They are actually the same creature,

only one had long lost its cry
when it buried it in the earth
to shelter it
and then forgot it.

Green on the eyes, red on the lips,
the other held on to its cry
and got a badminton racket,
a racket like the one which we,
as children, used to strike flying beetles
and some used to, after knocking them down,
halve them with the racket’s edges,
crooking its rims
and ripping its net,

but not me.

This morning, the duck ate pomegranate.
Or, it had yesterday hatched that pomegranate.
It was red,
with a red beak and a red tail,
it was as green,
as a locust, a cricket,
as red and as green as meat sitting on grass.

The day is as standard
as the wounds on the knees,
elbows,
calves and thighs of the girls,
playing football,
on a mine field,
in grass rising above their waist.

We are not of the kind that doesn’t
credit its sources: a girl flushes all
but ashes down the drain. We don't know
what to do with those

blinds made out of lost foxes
stretched taut between glass sheets.
Will we be late for the sun,
or won’t we? If it rains,

we are going to miss the funeral,
like the time they missed
putting the oak tree out
because nature can take care of itself.
I will ask too many questions.

Don’t bring up my birthday,
your mother didn’t count your teeth either
but you turned out just fine, didn't you,

didn’t it turn out just fine
counting red beans
instead of each escaping sun?

1.
I will move to Iceland
like a flock of birds,
like two bales of wheat,
treading under the sun
to exhaustion, their skin
yoked to vertigo
with soft ribbons.

I say: it's reliable.
this doesn't mean: safety,

this does mean:
my body is bound
and I am floating
like an amoeba
as free as
a life belt
without a
drowning man
to rescue.

This empty core
is Iceland:
my need
to be warm
and thrown into water.

my desire
to see you
blown up by a bomb
from my stomach

my hands
hold binoculars
watching me from the shore
in an explosion
inviting me
to forget my name.

2.
Iceland.
The desire to become cold.
To only have sterile thoughts
and mouth simple sentences,
to mount a rock of wet salt
and eat plain oatmeal,

to wear thick woolen socks,
to forsake human touch,
and, once a month, to visit,
white foxes.

I would like an eternal Winter,
I would like my room's yard
to become its empire.
I would sprawl on her cushions,

and have her tell me that, in her youth, she
would sit on the chest of young men
and stay with them
until they ran
out of breath.

3.
I am sending you a letter from Iceland:
here everything is white,
like the clouds I captured
from the airplane window
when I came to see you.

During the day, the sky seems
like the North pole.
You cannot see the ground.
During the night, the soil
looks like a web of stars.

I omit the brown details.
I lie it snows.
In the end, I don't send the letter,
I don't begin hating the world,
I don't curl into bed naked,
and I don't cry.

4.
Your core is tiny,
flushed, soft, smooth tissue,
beneath a pile of knives.

On a white morning,

I will draw them one by one,
like nails from a tent,
and stab them in the foreheads
of those who exposed you.

My friends live in gaps between the wardrobe and the wall
that are impossible to reach,
as I stretch my arms, a web of silence
enters my mouth; they are the shady silence of plaster.
I tell her: choose a picture frame
and stick your scalp through its hollow body,
push the supple roots of hair untouched by sun,
sprinkled with flour,

sneak out of his kitchen or jump through the window
from the tenth floor, you'll land on the atoms of possibilities
like the ashen flowers in the district park.

Your eyes: symbols for bursting, heavy breasts,
sagging from your father's eyes, from equine milk, and presents
that shed from your skin instead of your husband's cruel lips.

His words gather in your bellybutton,
and crawl to your neck, like cypresses in the cemetery,
and suddenly, instead of dust, it is you hanging from the chandelier.

My friends are mine because they are no one’s,
they only listen to themselves and touch only themselves,
my friend is the table leg
whose splinter pierces your thumb while moving house.

My friend: a small plastic ball
filled with brown fluid

My friend is a curly hair
in the drain of her throat

He tells her: together we drew boundaries
to clean furniture together
She tells him: it's easy to fall apart, it's hard
to pierce a pea with your fork

My friends are the first sorrows
whom I genuinely loved

They are the first to make decisions
and the only ones to carry them through

My friends are tall buildings
whose hands hold the foundations

My friends are an airplane
with concrete legs

Her gaze is a knife stuck into bread.
She closed her eyes not to shed
faded memories
from her pupils.
I placed two shiners on her eyelids
and said sleep, you must be tired.

Yesterday morning, she chipped a tooth.
She put the crown into a box and withered.
For years I believed that she was a forest,
that the slopes of her teeth hid hazelnuts,

and maybe they really did.
Since she vanished, I’ve been seeing
a loaf of bread on each table
and a knife stuck in it.

There are too many houses in our room.
In each house, there is a table.
Around each table, three toothless witches
chew at the narrow end.

To bury yourself in ashes:
a blissful thought, after a century asleep
in an amphora,
burdened by heavy delights.
Heavy, because on hold,
to burst like a chestnut with its stomach split open,
and to begin dreaming.

Dreaming about the birth of an olive,
the bruised thighs of skies that crows
pluck from their nests with beaks,
string by string,
until there is nothing left
but dreams of skinniness and silence,
ceramic backs
and doors.

To appear in the sun's apron.
To float in a mossy carriage, to
stretch into a column emanating from the bowl.

An ordinary wooden bowl is
the hard core of our greeting,
and slack is its gait.

To open your eyes,
invite the army to invade the city
and lay your forehead in a valley,
the flipside of an elbow.

We’ve reached the age when maturity
has nothing to do with years:
birds communicate
by aping heavenly bodies
with their movement.
Frogs roam the seas
by using their silky films
as sails.
My seven days of solitude went as follows:
on the first day, I didn’t realize I was alone.

On the second day, my routine
proceeded as usual.
I ate nothing
and slept little,
cooked a soup from your shirt
should I have to welcome some guest.
I ended up using it to clean the windows,
which trumps
hurling an insult towards the door
the door that welcomes no visitors,
the door that is locked,
sown in the warm walls of my stomach,
a hedgehog's home, swallowed.

When, on the third day, I realized I was alone,
the fish got scared and gathered into a flock.
They held a meeting and decided
to proceed living as silver bats.
They’ll fly towards the light, close their eyes,
and count the days with the sensors in their throats.
I decided to remain alone,
and embrace this state
as the time of my long recovery.

I don’t remember the fourth day.

I remember the fifth day well
but prefer not to talk about it.

On the sixth day, I decided:
I will be alone.

And indeed, the seventh day.
Like ice cracking in my knees,
in my thanks,
in me-spider's knuckles,
who resembles a dog,
in me-fox's teeth,
who resembles a wolf.

Yellow inertia of arrival
of fruits, apples, pears,
sprouted from a stone that was dug in like a heel,
swam out of water.

All fruit is yellow
and appears only in hints,
thickness of noon approaches us like a tame train,
regularly, with delicate deviations,
and warns us to be careful,
with mild smiles,
clean surfaces, and heated steel hearts,
ready to smother snakes with shovels,
and to seek them under every stone.

She has fireproof hands, and
hides them in the oven like a snake hides its legs,
stretches her neck, scalp and chin tracing straight lines,
and searches the sky for scars
coming out the backs of planes.

She can't burn herself on me,
she can't learn my name.
Our irises are fixed within eyelashes
that calibrate like flower buds,
buds of May,
escorting heads and tails.

I'm so happy to have you,
you stole a part of the car so nobody could drive it,
and now you are hitchhiking, wondering
whether it was worth it.

Your grassy tongue hides lies,
sweet, summery slights that enable you to love me.

When you melt my name in your mouth,
I’d swear it's not my name.
When your mouth kisses my cheek,
I’d swear it's not my cheek.

To admire a bee: she wakes up early and flies around darkness,
and, instead of pollen, gathers the shine of a sleeping
balcony railing, so smooth it seems to
overflow with water,
and that surface sticks to her feet
like she stepped in honey, and
she falls to the floor in sorrow and stops.

This happens to me every morning.

To admire a fish: she gets hooked by choice,
she was put there by the fingers of a round sun, whose
meaty forefinger and thumb flattened her mouth into an oval wound
and dropped in it a rhetorical question.
It's the skill of using your body as someone else’s corpse
and cheating your own expectations.
without disappointing anyone.

This wound doesn’t hurt, you were born with it.

And to run, to admire ropes
and their ability to both engulf and miss
the middle of the neck they're choking,
to run with your rope after yourself
like flying a kite with no wind,
to blindfold yourself
with arms you turned to fences,

hooks and ropes.
To celebrate in the dark the sarcasm of a Monday,
a calendar where every animal looks the same,
every stomach the same,
where beaks are on giraffes,

and spheres at markets.

To scrape off your skin,
scan it in the park
and mail it to yourself.

To do something new, unexpected.
Like spilling apple juice.