November 2016

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The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

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VOLUME: 1 - ISSUE: 8

15 - 11 - 2016

Columns: Sotto Voce:-Indira Parthasarathy 06 Musings Of An Axolotl: C.S.Lakshmi 36 P&P: Yonason Goldson 44

Letter from London: John Looker 15 Flash Fiction: Jeff Coleman 21 Poetry: William Doreski 24 Book Review:Uhaul-A Collection of Lesbian Love Poems

Emily Ramser/ Smriti Nevatia 31 Macedonian Literature: Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

Zoran Anchevski 49 Macedonian Poetry: Katica ÐŒulavkova 56 Lidija-Dimkovska 78 Nikola Madzirov 83 Tihomir Janchovski 71 Zoran Anchevski 65 Vladimir Martinovski 88 Fiction: Olivera Kjorveziroska 92

THE WAGON MAGAZINE KGE TEAM 4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The deeper a well is dug, the more the water that springs; the more one learns, the more the wisdom it brings - Thirukkural -396 The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

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PRASAD'S POST “Ear mime, words wag, dregs in the wineglass of a voice” – Evodus, Greek poet. * This is ‘that’ time of the year; Nobel Prize for literature to be announced; those involved waited eagerly. When it was announced on 13th October 2016, it was a surprise to many, particularly the betting firm Ladbroke. As the Swedish Academy does not release a shortlist of winners until after 50 years from now on, Ladbroke took over the job of naming literary works of scholars and listing the predicted authors who may clinch the ‘Nobel Crown’. Bob Dylan’s name was not there at all. British author, Rajeev Balasubramanyam writes, “The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been a favourite to win for years.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

4 This year, according to the gambling site of Ladbrokes, the odds were 4-to-1 in Ngugi’s favour, with Haruki Murakami second at 7-to-1, and Don DeLillo at 12to-1”. If you had assumed that ‘betting’ is for horse races and gambling roulettes only, you are living in a different planet.

To receive an award in literature, according to David Baldacci, novelist, in a different context pertaining to another popular literary award which suits here, “All you have to do is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.”

There are a number of articles instantaneously mushroomed soon after the announcement, for and against Bob Dylon’s merit, though none denied his international fame in another field. Most are of the opinion that ‘Bob Dylan does not need a Nobel Prize in Literature, but literature needs a Nobel Prize’. No doubt, Bob Dylan is a brilliant lyrist and his lyrics could be labelled as poetry too. What is missed here is an opportunity to honour a writer. In the book market such a prize would mean a raise in sales and readership.

Of course, controversy is not new to the Swedish academy, particularly in the field of literature. * A worried man with a worried mind No one in front of me and nothing behind There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes I’m looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

5 Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose People are crazy and times are strange I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range I used to care, but things have changed This place ain’t doing me any good I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood Just for a second there I thought I saw something move Gonna take dancing lessons, do the jitterbug rag Ain’t no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag Only a fool in here would think he’s got anything to prove Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road If the Bible is right, the world will explode I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can Some things are too hot to touch The human mind can only stand so much You can’t win with a losing hand Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street I hurt easy, I just don’t show it You can hurt someone and not even know it The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity Gonna get low down, gonna fly high All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie I’m in love with a woman who don’t even appeal to me Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake I’m not that eager to make a mistake * ‘Things Have Changed’ is the title of the above piece, sung by Bob Dylan.

Is it a poem or a lyric?

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

6 11th Kafla InterContinental’s International Writers Festival – India

Udaipur, in Rajasthan State of India, hosted the above festival for two days in last October 14 and 15, organized by Inter-Continental Cultural Association of Chandigarh in Punjab State and Department of English, Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.

The main theme of the Festival was ‘the whole world is one family’ ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’.

I recall a Sangam poem, written by KaNiyan PoongKundran, which reflects the same expression: ‘Yaadhum Oorey; Yaavarum KeLir’, meaning: ‘Every habitat is mine and every man is my kin’.

And the main focus of the meet was ‘Literature and World peace’. Special mention should be given to Mr. Dev Bhardwaj, Editor, Kafla International and Director, India InterContinental Cultural Association, and Dr. Seema Malik, Head of the Department of English, Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India for the success of this meet.

The hall was filled with the regional writers of India’s many languages, Indian-English writers, delegates from Canada, Bangladesh, Egypt, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and a group of young writers from Uzbekistan. An exclusive poetry reading session was held for a few undergraduates from various faculties of the university. In cordial atmosphere, with camaraderie, people of various regions and lands shared their poems and papers. It was an interesting memorable couple of days of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, indeed. ( For more photographs of the event please visit www.thewagonmagazine.com )

Krishna Prasad a. k. a. Chithan The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

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SOTTO VOCE INDIRA PARTHASARATHY

My experiments with Tamil theatre Four decades ago, when I was conversing with the late Rajinder Paul, the Editor of one of the most illustrious theatre magazines of those days (‘Enact’), he put me a question that I was unable to answer at that moment. And, in fact, I am not sure that even today whether I have found the answer.

He asked me, ‘How come in Tamil Nadu, good music and dance receive a quality response from, what I would say …. an enlightened audience and yet, at the same time, the same people are content with mediocre Tamil theatre and films? I am not qualified to say this but this is what I heard from my Tamil friends who know what they are talking about.’

I felt, perhaps, he was charitable calling it ‘mediocre’, because it The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

8 was a period, when the professional Tamil theatre was almost dead and ‘the Sabha dramas’ with their patented ‘laugh a minute’ formula, held their sway in the Metropolitan city Chennai, what was then called, Madras.

It was during this period, in 1969, I wrote my first Tamil play ‘Mazhai’ (‘Rains’) not in Chennai but in Delhi.

One advantage I had was, that I was away from Chennai, living in Delhi that provided a totally different theatre environment at that point of time that I was not geographically bound by the familiar certainties and conventions of a static and mono-aesthetic cultural climate that marked the Tamil stage during this period. Only in an environment, where the society is cosmopolitan and alive to the changing values, (changes dictated by the contemporary needs) is it possible to experiment with new modes of expression.

A popular Singapore Tamil magazine had commissioned me to write a serial for them and initially I had planned to write ‘Mazhai’ as a novel. It came to me as a revelation soon after I started writing a page or two, that the theme I had in mind was a subject for a play and not for a novel. Once I began to write again in the dramatic form, to my great satisfaction, I found the play wrote itself.

My first play was about loneliness and freedom set in the background of a family drama with a Freudian-Oedipal motif.

Man solved the problem of ‘loneliness’ by creating such social systems as marriage, community, religion etc but at what price? And also it is true that one is free when he is alone but to what end? And I was clear in my mind when I wrote my first play that it was not for me to repair the old systems by offering something equally dogmatic, assertive and solution-bearing.

The play has four characters. A widowed father, who refuses to see the world beyond himself and his books on philosophy, his spinster daughter, trapped in a situation of love-hate relationship with The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

9 her father, his son, living away from them, in a self-imposed state of alienation that what he thinks gives him dignity and a divorced rural doctor, a do-gooder with cultivated simplicity and carrying his stethoscope as his cross. The story is told in the background of omnipotent but blind Nature, represented by the unceasing rains, which heightens the climate of depression and despair.

The play was staged in Delhi at the AIFACS hall by the conventional stage group Dhakshina Bharatha Nataka Sangam for a conventional audience in 1969 thanks to the initiative taken by its secretary, S.K.S.Mani (now known in Chennai as Bharathi Mani).

I sat in the last row to watch the reaction of the audience to my play, which I thought, could have been a totally different experience for them. An old lady, who sat by my side, sat silent for a few seconds, when the curtains came own after 90 minutes and then asked me whether the play was over.

I said ‘Yes’.

‘How do you know?’ she asked.

‘Because I wrote the play’ Then she gave me such a sad look that haunted me even at that time, I started writing my second play. I am not sure, whether that lady came to see my plays thereafter.

The second play I wrote soon after the first one had this thematic content that we should stop fooling ourselves about ourselves, about society, about the meaning of life and the universe and lastly about theatre itself, which is after all, is make-believe. The play suggested that one needed living stoically on a strictly ‘as-if ’ basis, and this basis may turn out to be an ‘aesthetic belief ’ substituting for religious faith, moral conviction and philosophical reason. I am quite aware after the explosion of science and technology in the last two centuries, one lives in a state of believing and not believing, which, precisely what we do in experiencing a work of art.

In this second play which was translated by N.S.Jagannathan, the former editor of ‘The Statesman’, which he called in a free translation The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

10 of my Tamil title as ‘The layers of blanket’, every one pretends he/she is not what he/she really is, and ultimately no one is sure whether it is just pretension.

No one is justified or condemned and the play can very well begin where it has ended. This play was translated into Hindi and was staged by the Little Theatre Group, and directed by B.M.Shaw with Uttra Broaker in the lead.

I had a totally different kind of experience, when in 1972, the DBNS, Delhi went to Madras to stage my first two plays and a few more by others of conventional flavor.

Some of the dialogues in ‘Mazhai’ and ‘Porvai porthiya udalgal’ are not exactly humorous but are intellectually sharp repartees that may provoke appreciative laughter among the audience. The gentleman, a Minister, who was the Chief Guest that day, in his speech once the play was over, after having watched the people laugh, publicly advised me to write more such ‘comedies’ like ‘Mazhai’ and ‘Porvai porthiya udalgal’. I used to feel surprised that even after a popular politician had certified my plays as ‘comedies’, there were no takers for them in Tamil Nadu!

Basically trained as a rigorous classical scholar in literature, I felt I needed retelling some of our myths and legends, including history to make them relevant in the context of our contemporary values.

‘Nandan Kathai,’ (‘The Legend of Nandan’) was a deconstructive retelling of the story of Nandan, the untouchable farm-labourer and devotee of Lord Shiva, a story, which was first narrated by one of the most eminent poets in Tamil who lived in the 11th century CE. According to the legend, Nandan gained access to the Nataraja temple in Chidambaram as a reward for his saintliness, crowned as a divinity, after he immolated himself in front of the Nataraja temple, as dictated by the Brahmin priests of the temple, who claimed The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

11 that Lord Shiva appeared in their collective dreams to proclaim that Nandan be admitted into the temple after a purification ritual by fire in front of the temple as he was born in a lowly caste.

I retold the story that the martyrdom of Nandan was engineered by the caste Hindu landlords and the Brahmins. The Brahmins felt that Nandan and his followers were a threat to their religious and spiritual authority. The land-owning caste Hindu landlords felt that this might loosen their hold on the economic power they had been enjoying. Nandan was made to believe that he could perform miracles by the grace of God and he entered the fire only to become a victim of the Establishment that always succeeded ultimately.

The play was written in stylized prose, set to a rhythmic beat.

Classical and folk forms of music and dance marked its structural pattern. Though the play written as such represented essentially the Tamil cultural genre, ironically it had its brilliant stage production in Hindi in Nautangi style, directed by Tripurari Sharma.

She directed the Tamil version also, a year later.

When I came to know that the great German philosopher Schopenhauer used to keep a copy of the Latin translation of the Upanisads, which, in turn, was rendered from the Persian translation done under the Mogul Emperor Shahjehan’s eldest son Prince Dara Shikoh’s supervision, I became immensely Interested in Mogul history that I thought I should write a play on Dara.

As I started reading the Mogul history, I began to realize that Shajehan’s third son Aurangzeb was no less an interesting character than Dara. The history that was being taught in the school, when I was young was all about the portrait gallery of heroes and villains and that Aurangzeb was a villain, given to religious bigotry, and he hated music and the Muse. But once when The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

12 I began to study all the materials available in regard to the Mogul history, I was surprised to know that Aurangzeb was not only fond of music when he was young and that also he had composed poems.

But why then this total change, when he grew up? Was it because he was greatly affected by an incident that had happened when he was eight years old? That he was sent as a surety of good faith by his father to his own father Jahangir, after he was defeated when he rose in revolt? Was he an unwanted child, whereas, his eldest brother Dara was the blue-eyed boy of his father?

Maybe, as he grew up he decided to stand against all the values that his brother had stood for to express his fraternal hostility.

Any narrative of Aurangzeb is bound to be of interest to the students of history, since it brings forth one of the significant ‘ifs’ in the sense that only if his eldest brother Dara had succeeded the Mogul throne instead of him! But I was not interested in this speculative game but my interest was in the dialectics of the power game that marks the political history the world over.

Shakespeare deals with this theme in all his historical plays and tragedies and no wonder therefore, as one of the fanatical lovers of Shakespearean plays, I decided to write this play. The objective was not to teach history but to portray how all our historical heroes are The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

13 our political contemporaries and how history does not feel tired to repeat itself. The interesting part of it is I wrote the play just eight months before Indira Gandhi declared ‘Emergency’ and it was staged in Hindi during the Emergency, directed by M.K.Raina.

‘Cilappadikaram’, a Tamil epic, probably in the 5th century CE, has an unusual theme of a woman challenging the ruler of a mighty Empire, seeking justice for her husband, who had been unjustly killed by a royal order. The story is unusual in another aspect that the epic is based on an original Tamil theme not adapted from Sanskrit, whereas, most of the thematic content of the stories in the Indian regional languages owe their origin to some Sanskrit version obtained from the Itihasas.

But the bottom line of the story is common to our Indian tradition and ethos; suffering of women. Either the heroine has to enter fire to prove her chastity, or publicly stripped in a royal assembly as a gambling debt. The heroine of ‘Cilappadikaram’ is no exception. Her husband is a philanderer, who, when he loses all his wealth, comes back to her, only to take her to the Pandaya Kingdom, in search of a new beginning. There he is killed falsely charged as a thief. Here we witness the transformation of a submissive wife into a universal face of a woman full of fury seeking vengeance for all her woes and sufferings. In the epic, she is shown as plucking her left breast and throws it away that sets fire to the capital city.

Based on this I wrote a play called ‘Kongai Thee’ (‘the flaming of the breast’).

All the characters in my play are shown as victims of an insufferable system. The hero is a merchant prince, who instead of trading, seeks solace in music and dance all the time and as such alienated from what he should have been. His paramour, a public woman, falls in love with him, which alienates her from her profession and turns out to be her personal The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

14 tragedy. The heroine, who has all along been submissive and ferociously devoted to her husband as dictated by the tradition, in a metaphorical statement de-womanises herself by throwing away her left breast, that stands for ‘woman’ in the concept of ‘Arthanaareeswara’.

Though I re-interpreted the characters in the contemporary context, I strictly followed the music and dance structure found in the original.

In fact, ‘Cilappadikaram’ is a literary illustration for ‘Natya Sastra’ by Bharathamuni. The author of this great epic calls it as an epic integrated with music, dance and drama.

‘Ramanuja’ was a vaishnava saint, who lived in the 12th century CE. Founder of the Vishishtadvaita school of philosophy, he was first and foremost a social reformer and a revolutionary thinker. As happens to all the prophets, he has been unfortunately institutionalized and all his teachings are totally misinterpreted by his narrow-minded sectarian followers. He was against the caste-system and he made the members of the oppressed community as his favourite disciples, calling them as ‘tirukulathar’ meaning ‘the blessed tribe’.

I thought it was necessary to write a play about Ramanuja, to represent his life and teachings. The events that are said to have happened in Ramanuja’s life, project him unfailingly that he looked at religion more as a social activity than as a spiritual experience. To make religion accessible to all transcending caste barriers, he declared the bhakti hymns written in Tamil were as sacred as the Sanskrit slokas, thereby democratizing the worship ritual.

Soon after, it was announced that my play ‘Ramanujar’ had won Saraswati Samman in 1999, opposition to the award came from the orthodox section of the Brahmin community. When the Birla Foundation sent me those letters, I replied that I wrote the play only to rescue Ramanuja from their hold.

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15 NSD got it staged in Chennai in the original language in which it was written and it was directed by K.S.Rajendran.

I am a playwright only and neither I have acted nor directed my plays. I am in good company, as it is said that Shakespeare had never acted in his plays except on one occasion he took the role of the ghost, which was Hamlet’s father.

But I strongly believe that every playwright is in a way, also its director, in the sense, that, while writing the scene, all that is going to happen on the stage, is projected before his mind’s eye. In fact, I strongly feel that a good contemporary playwright writes more or less only the production scripts unlike a Shakespeare or Kalidasa.

I do believe that the director of a play is as important as the playwright. It happened in the sixties of the last century, an Inspector of schools, when he visited a class, asked the pupils to mention the author of ‘Hamlet’. The answer was ‘Lawrence Olivier’. Amusing it may be, during that period a critical discussion was on to decide who was more important for the success of the play, director or playwright?

A critic wrote that the script is a mere recipe on paper for the production of an integrated version of the staged art. It was during this era that the Polish director Grotowskie announced the production of what he called ‘Grotowskie’s Hamlet after Shakespeare’, which in other words meant, ‘A play by Grotowskie, written by someone known as Shakespeare.’

It does not mean that I am criticizing the value of a director but I only want that he/she should not use the text as a pretext for producing a play. I give him/her full freedom to interpret the play in the manner he/ she wants. In fact, when a good director successfully converts a ‘literary’ word of the author into a powerful dramatic word on the stage, as I strongly believe that the words are also invisible actors, I feel greatly thrilled.

And, in fact, that was immensely responsible for the immense success and popularity of Lawrence Olivier.

Excerpts from the author’s talk in the National School of Drama, Delhi, when he was honoured in ‘The Living Legends series’ on 4th Feb 2016.

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Letter from London -1 from John Looker

(LETTER FROM LONDON is a new feature from this issue onwards. As I expected, this ‘letter from London’ by John Looker renders a bird’s view of literary and Art scenerio of London. Interesting to read about the Poetry Library; Irish folk music; Tate Modern Art Gallery; Globe Theatre with its new ‘Imogen, a reframed production of Cymbeline’ (for this, the Artistic Director Emma Rice has been much criticised); Golden Hind, the Clink, and Southwark Cathedral...., in one go. I wish I were there to walk with John Looker. After reading this, you might too. Looking forward to more such letters from John Looker.) - Krishna Prasad.

Sweet Thames, run softly (-The Waste Land by TS Eliot, part 3)

Dear Reader, I have resolved not to write about – not even to think about – the earthquake that rocked Britain last June. Half the people are still in shock, the other half filled with glee (the precise figures being 48% and 52%).

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

17 I walked by the Thames yesterday, along pedestrianised South Bank of London, watching the barges and tourist boats, enjoying the crowds in the autumn sunshine and going from one cultural hotspot to another. And as I did so, an old familiar puzzle came to mind.

I intended to start at the Poetry Library, which houses the national collection, but this is on the top floor of the Royal Festival Hall and before I even took the lift I found a musical recital in full flow in the cafe: BBC Radio 3 were recording Irish folk music before an audience sprawling on sofas or sipping coffee at the tables. You would have been enchanted, especially by the violin, or rather the ‘fiddle’, which lifted the spirits in a foot-tapping dance. Of all the arts, it would seem that music rules. We plug it into our ears from morning till night and everyone is expected to have their favourite genre.

I found other musicians during the day: buskers with their backs to the sparkling Thames, or in one case under the arch of a bridge – Baroque music on a double base, the cavernous space reverberating deeply.

But back to the Poetry Library; such a small room, but its treasures are hidden. If, like Aladdin, you know the password then great stacks of shelves move open to admit you to their concealed depths.

Like many national museums and galleries in the UK, this library is free to join. I regularly borrow books online, but to go in person is better. The place The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

18 is quiet, partly because conversations are whispered, as readers of all sorts browse books and journals. But there were only half a dozen of us there, far fewer than downstairs listening to the music.

I usually look for my own book on the shelves, hoping to find it is out on loan or at least looking the worse for wear. It never is.

After an hour reading, and feeling at peace with the world, I left to follow the South Bank past galleries, theatres and museums, moving with the crowds. And what do you make of this: under one of the bridges were the second-hand book sellers, their wares laid out on long tables – and three times as many people browsing than were found in the Poetry Library.

Next stop was Tate Modern, the art gallery that easily fills the former power station. On a typical Saturday around 25,000 visit Tate Modern.

Entrance is free – and we must hope that the UK’s exit from the EU does not sink the public revenues needed for this – but thousands of visitors also pay for admission to special exhibitions.

And everyone pauses to see what is on in the vast space that was formerly the Turbine Hall.

That’s what I had gone for yesterday. The scale of the place is breathtaking: 35 meters high and 152 meters long. Art installations here have to be Big. They also need big sponsorship, and the present benefactor is the Japanese company Hyundai that invested in Britain to establish its presence in the EU. The latest installation is by the Frenchman Philippe Parreno and it presents moving panels, flying fish, sound and light – effects The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

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generated randomly by live yeast cultures in a dish, set up by scientists from University College London and linked mathematically to a control console. The result is bizarre – and, older than our prime Minister, I was flattered to be asked by two young men if I could explain what was going on.

About a hundred people were lying on the carpeted floor gazing up at the moving pieces above them, taking in the flashing lights and unexpected sounds – many beamed in from traffic on the Thames outside. I lay down with them.

And here is that puzzle again. Everyone loves art, don’t they?

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20 No-one seems dismayed by the inexplicable, or looks for meaning beyond sheer sensory pleasure for the eyes and ears, or touch. Even the Turbine Hall did not overwhelm the sense that one was here in a crowd of likeminded people. How utterly unlike the tiny space of the Poetry Library and its secret shelves. Of course poems, being immaterial, are not to be judged on the size of their room. Yet how many people, do you think, read poetry with any regularity, compared with listeners to music or viewers of art?

My walk continued. Past Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre currently showing The Merchant Of Venice and Imogen ... what’s that you ask?

Shakespeare did not write a play called Imogen?

Well, no, but there is a new artistic director at the Globe and she has taken his Cymbeline, renamed and re-written it, and in doing so given some of our theatre critics apoplexy. The Globe is a wonderful place to capture the feel of Elizabethan theatre-going, with tickets at pocketmoney prices for the groundlings who are often drawn into the action, serving as Roman crowd or medieval court.

Again, that puzzle comes to mind. Shakespeare’s English differs from ours but the actors know how to convey every nuance and (although the new director might doubt this) people are undeterred The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

21 and love it. What do you suppose deters them therefore from modern poetry?

On past the Golden Hind, the Clink, and Southwark Cathedral towards Tower Bridge; Always the river on my left with its busy commerce, and ahead the container ports and docks and the estuary.

As Wordsworth said in 1802, looking across London from Westminster Bridge: Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.

I wish you could have joined me yesterday. I would scarcely have mentioned ‘Brexit’.

John Looker lives in southern England. He has written poetry all his life and now, in retirement, draws on the experience of a long career in the British civil service, on family life and on international travel. In his book The Human Hive, available through Amazon, John Looker explores our common humanity, down the ages and round the globe, by looking through the lens of work and human activity.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

22 FLASH FICTION

JEFF COLEMAN

Doing the Right Thing Max looked down at his feet. Gazed back up at the desolate street. Watched as his breath plumed before him in the cold midnight air like dragon’s breath.

He waited.

How had he gotten to this point? He took hold of who he was, and like a string he tried to follow it back through time. But that string was so tangled and twisted that he found he wasn’t able to follow it back very far.

His father had introduced him to this lifestyle when he was a child, but that was no excuse. He’d had plenty of opportunities to escape. So why hadn’t he run off when he’d had the chance?

A shadow caught his eye, and he turned in its direction just in time for the darkness before him to melt, morph, and coalesce into the figure of another man. The figure dropped a cigarette to the ground, tamped it beneath the heel of a thick leather boot and tipped a broad fedora hat in Max’s direction.

“Evening,” said the man, and oddly Max was reminded of John Wayne. He reached out with a thick muscular hand. Max took it and shook.

“Evening,” echoed Max. Butterflies churned in his stomach.

This was it. This was when it all went to Hell.

“The boss has another job for you,” said the man, reaching in his pocket for a second cigarette. “A gentleman by the name of Richardson. Says he’ll pay quite a sum if you can do this one right.”

A stainless steel lighter sparked, ignited. The man lit up and took a long drag. “Sounds important.”

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23 Max shifted his feet, shivered as the frigid air pressed in around him.

Richardson. Max wondered how he’d crossed the boss’s path, and he could only speculate on how terribly he’d fucked up to warrant the boss’s intervention.

Max would be asked to introduce himself, to befriend him, to gain his trust so that he could ultimately lure him to his demise. It was a skill he was good at, a skill that ran in his family, the ability to read minds, to get at the heart of a person’s needs and desires. That, along with a pinch of charisma, won them over every time.

No doubt Richardson would be dethroned. That was the boss’s term. It meant he would be stripped of everything but his life, imprisoned just outside the range of human perception, forced to look on from the shadows in despair as someone else stole his identity, his life, and enjoyed all the things that were rightfully his. He would be doomed to wander the Earth in exile forever.

Like a disinherited prince, the boss was wont to say, hence the term.

But Max wanted no part of it, not anymore. He’d ruined too many lives, had betrayed too many people’s trust, consigning them to a fate worse than death. He’d foolishly followed in his father’s footsteps, but he would follow no further.

“Actually,” said Max in a strangely quiet voice, “I wanted to talk to you about that.”

The man squinted. “Yes?” “Well, I—” What was he doing? The boss would tear him apart. Perhaps he too would be dethroned. Well then, it would be a fitting punishment, atonement for his own crimes.

“Go on,” said the man.

“I mean, it’s just that— I thought maybe I’d go to school, try to make a different kind of life for myself.”

The man stared at him, boring a hole through Max’s skull.

Then without warning he threw back his head and laughed a hearty mirth that took Max aback.

“School? You’re a funny guy, Max. A very funny guy.”

“I’m serious. I—” “Stop,” said the man, and just like that the laughter was gone.

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24 “You’ll want to stop joking, because sometimes,” said the man, backing Max into a brick wall, “jokes have consequences.”

Max swallowed. He’d prepared for this moment, had practiced what he would say in front of a mirror for hours. But now that he was here and actually saying it, the imagined bluster and bravado had evaporated.

“I can’t,” Max stammered. “Not anymore. It’s too much.”

“The boss gave you everything. And your father. And your grandfather.”

“I appreciate everything the bos—” “Bullshit,” said the man, poking him hard in the chest, “I don’t think you do. The boss needs you, Max. Your family has a rare skill that he needs, and in return there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

And now you’re going to deny him, why? Because it’s hard? Because it hurts? Because suddenly your conscience bothers you and you want to sleep better at night?”

“This is wrong,” said Max, slowly picking up steam. He’d already pushed too far; his fate had been sealed the moment he opened his mouth. “You know it is. I can’t undo what my family’s done, but I don’t have to be a part of it anymore.”

The man glared at him, goggling as if Max had just proclaimed with religious zeal that the Earth was flat. Finally, after a long silence: “So, that’s it then?”“Yes,” said Max, and he shrugged. “I have to do the right thing.”

“All right.” The man released Max, and he slid down onto the sidewalk, his legs suddenly too weak to support his weight. “You’ll be hearing from the boss soon.” The man stepped back, melted once more into the shadows. “Real soon.”

Once again Max waited.

Jeff Coleman, Modern Literary Fantasy Author http://blog.jeffcolemanwrites.com/ The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

25

POEMS William Doreski

Fishing in the Charles Claw-footing stone to stone in shallows, indifferent to runners, dog-walkers, us, a great blue heron rummages for fish for a midday snack.

As we watch, it spears and scissors a perch, hoists and swallows it in a long undulant gesture of unfolded neck. Hardly a ripple marks the site. The staid geometry of MIT across the river looks aghast, but it always does. Behind us, the Prudential Center towers prop themselves against the clouds.

Such an urban frame to feature such a primal event. We nod to acknowledge the heron’s skill,

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

26 its adaptive style, the S-bend of neck, prehensile stick-legs that hardly seem to part water, the wings folded like tissue.

This heron grace punctuates with diacritical urgency, but almost no one has noticed the uncommon sighting, and only we have paused to note how easily that fish went down, and consider how bottomless the place it now inhabits.

As if a Treasure Map Your chosen black locust tree, a sprawl of thick-muscled limbs, wrestles and subdues its corner of the Public Garden. Tourists rarely brave this sector where shade deepens to shield you while reading Henry James or Hawthorne. Sometimes you have to scowl away a casual trespasser unaware the bench embodies your greenest moods.

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27 Today as the tree peers down you close The Ambassadors with a firm but prayerful motion and open a shy black sketchbook.

You color much of a page a decisive shade of brick, leaving a ring of marbled white moating a brick isle you label “Master”…and then below it, “Something”… in tentative script.

X-marks, as if a treasure map, spike the moat and nail your sketch to something far behind it, something in the way the hero of James’ novel regards you, regards all thoughtful women: with grave textual complexities.

The tree shrugs off the shadow your drawing casts on your corner of the garden. It unlimbers in a gray wind off the Charles.

You toss novel and sketchbook into your Raven Books tote bag and totter off, leaving a ghost to converse with the locust in voices only the Master hears, the “something” the rest of us with our untrained ears suspect The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

28

Public and Private Monuments

Am I allowed to taste the rain?

On Commonwealth the English elms heave up last year’s birds’ nests and drop twigs on snooping dogs.

My first architectural walk in years leads past the statue of Sam Morison, who greets me with his placid sailor’s hello, enunciated in clear blue tones that evoke the sea horizon complete with a distant squall.

As I trundle past he waves one heavy bronze arm and gestures at the Public Garden where squirrels frisk among tourists for snacks.

Despite the light rain a mob surrounds the equestrian George Washington riding toward the edge of eternity where his dental work will flourish in the finest shades of ivory.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

29 Am I allowed to taste the rain that you planned on keeping for yourself? I got out early, drove seventy miles before dawn, leaving you to tend the garden by yourself. Mr. Morison knew I was coming. Tea with him years ago on Brimmer Street lingers with a smell of old brown leather.

Traffic snores down Arlington.

I walk to the corner and cross, and passing through the iron gate and circling Washington’s pedestal and rambling along the duck pond I sneak a couple of tastes of rain and let it nourish and inspire me with evolutionary notions of which only you would approve.

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30

Among the Animals

On the Athenaeum’s fifth floor in your favorite red leather chair— the only one compact enough to fit your thighs—you’re reading Wind in the Willows with both eyes shivering across the pages.

Scholars tucked into alcoves shudder over massive insights that if unfolded on their laptops are certain to solve the planet.

They should don the square paper hats of Newtonians just for fun.

They should hoot and toot like Toad sputtering in the dust of autos.

They should note how poised you pose in that red leather chair positioned to face the length of the building.

Certain standards of intellect apply to the slightest gestures— the re-shelving of books, the flip of a page of one’s notebook, the tick-tock of computer keys The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

31 as a dissertation unfolds one endnote after another.

Rat and Mole and Toad require a stable natural environment, which beyond these tempered walls has fractured into photographs too carefully framed to survive.

Your red chair props you against the city’s onrush. The old gray light exuded from puritan graves is faint but still tough enough to choke those unwary folks who haven’t found cushy seating and something golden to read.

William Doreski recently retired after years of teaching at Keene State College in New Hampshire (USA). His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013).

He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.

His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

32

Book Review

Smriti Nevatia

Uhaul: A Collection of Lesbian Love Poems

by Emily Ramser

Mirrors and Testaments Much like ‘Xerox’ tends to be synonymous with photocopy in India, the name of the American company ‘U-haul’ has been in use there as a generic term for trucks in which you load your worldly possessions in order to move house. That’s not the only thing that makes Uhaul: A Collection of Lesbian Love Poems a highly culture -specific title. As Wiki dutifully informs us, ‘U-Haul lesbian or U-Haul syndrome is a stereotype of lesbian relationships, referring to the joke that lesbians tend to move in together on the second date.’

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33 This reviewer was both disarmed by its self-deprecation and apprehensive that the title would turn out to be somewhat literal.

Fortunately, the poems allay that particular fear, even if they do not quite debunk (much less subvert) the stereotype. There is a stray reference to sharing the mirror while brushing teeth, another to drinking coffee together in bed, but the closest we get to the ‘syndrome’ is this: The green and white striped towel is yours.

The blue one is mine.

The sleeveless shirts are yours, but I like to wear them sometimes.

My side of the room is a mess because I don’t actually live here, though we like to pretend that I do.

While you’re at work, I drink coffee and wonder if one day I’ll be the home, you’re coming home too.

Not the best lines in the book, those. The shoddy editing of this volume (that irksome comma at the end of the second last line above; the quite unacceptable ‘to’ and ‘too’ mix-up of the last line; elsewhere, ‘breathe’ where clearly what’s meant is ‘breath’) is somewhat compensated for by Sara Tolbert’s illustrations – some oneto-one images from the poems, like ‘Queer’ cursively tattooed on an abdomen, others more freely associative, like the one with many shadowy figures – crowd of onlookers? or longed-for community? – seen among the trails of smoke rising from a skillet, that accompanies this poem: I’d Steal You A Skillet You want to steal a cast iron skillet from Chili’s, but you can’t till you’re married per your family’s traditions, so if I were to steal you a skillet, I’d be proposing amongst the crowded chairs The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

34 of a chain restaurant, which makes me wonder if this poem is technically a proposal too.

In an interview reproduced in the September 2016 issue of Wagon, Emily Ramser offered the beginnings of a personal manifesto: ‘Heterosexual love poetry has been published for ages upon ages. I think it’s time to show that homosexual love poetry is just as valid as heterosexual love poetry. It’s okay to be gay, and it’s okay to write about being gay.’ When it comes to poetry, however, the reader might well look beyond the legitimacy of feeling, or of subject matter, for a whole other range of delights. How straitened, then, is this hypothetical reader by the title’s tagline? Must ‘lesbian love poems’ contain unmistakable clues to a certain experience of human sexuality? Would the poems make sense even without that given context (and is that a good thing?); are they more meaningful when placed within it?

It may be useful to consider two examples, one iconic-classic and the other more contemporary, of great homosexual love poetry. W.H.Auden’s Lay your sleeping head my love.. may be read, of course, as a heterosexual lyric, but loses much of its meaning, not to mention luminosity, if it is not understood that speaker and spoken-to are both men (But in my arms till break of day/ Let the living creature lie,/ Mortal, guilty, but to me/ The entirely beautiful.

Also And fashionable madmen raise/ Their pedantic boring cry:/ Every farthing of the cost,/ All the dreaded cards foretell,/ Shall be paid… And, not least, Nights of insult let you pass/ Watched by every human love.).

Then there is British poet Carol Ann Duffy’s collection Rapture (2005), which came close to being a bestseller because its buying readership, no matter how individuals identified in terms of sexuality, would have found in both its celebratory and grieving poems enough that was experientially familiar ( Your fine hair, run through my fingers, / sieved./ Your silver smile, your jackpot laugh;/ bright gifts./ Sighted amber, the 1001 nights/ of your eyes./ Even the sparkling fool’s gold/ of your lies. Or, to the lover who, through her death, has left The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

35 the speaker less than alive, …Who’ll guess, if they read/ your stone, or press their thumbs to the scars/ of your dates, that were I alive, I would lie in the grass/ above your bones till I mirrored your pose, your infinite grace?”).

That ‘mirroring’ is a hint, if hint were needed. Duffy, like Ramser, is very much an ‘out’ poet, who does ‘lesbian love poems’ rather splendidly, and her popularity indicates that her fans must surely leave their homophobia, if any, behind. What, then, does Emily Ramser’s slender collection (only 12 short poems) serve up, poetry-wise as well as validation-of-same-sex-love-in-the-world-wise?

One thing that struck this reviewer was an assurance, a control over rhythm and effect that is almost deceptive, because the poems often have an everyday speech quality – admirable when it works, banal and prosaic when it falls short. Ramser is at her best when she speaks of sexual passion and play, bodies and lovemaking, and when she renders details of her very subject as objective correlatives for containing all that coursing emotion: . . . I would give you the love line of my left palm to wear as a necklace for when you need a reminder of the way I kissed your collarbones.

This self-reflexivity finds its fullest expression in the final poem: Let Me Write For You Let me write this poem across your abdomen with my tongue, ...

Let me scratch sonnets into your skin, tangle your hair into tankas, hickie haikus down your neck, kiss quatrains across your cheeks bite odes into your lips.

Let me lay you down and scribble strophes along your spine, caress you with anaphoras, The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

36 touch your temples with my lips and whisper rhymes in your ear. . . .

All 12 poems are in the first person and addressed to a second person. The gender of the addressee-beloved is never foregrounded, apart from one mention of breasts. Nor do the poems actually tell us anything about the gender of the speaker, except for these lines from the first poem: she asked me if I was a lesbian, and I gagged on my tongue when I tried to say no because I’ve been writing all these poems about caressing your hipbones . . .

It’s left to you, as a reader in the know, to read these poems as testaments – as nothing less than an attempt, through poetry, at naturalising and normalising a love that proudly speaks its name in the face of traditional hostilities, and hostile traditions. It’s not outstanding work (the poet is an undergraduate, perhaps still finding her distinctive voice) but the poems are sensuous, sometimes ironic, occasionally moving, and could well play their part in the much bigger enterprise of reclaiming image, metaphor, metre, affect, and art, on behalf of a love that’s same old same old yet different.

‘Uhaul: A Collection of Lesbian Love Poems’ – by Emily Ramser.

Published by Weasel Press, 2016. 30 pages. Price $???.

Smriti Nevatia is known to toss off the occasional poem

herself, while earning a living as text editor, and curator of themed film festivals. She has edited several issues of the zine ‘Scripts’ brought out by the Bombay-based LABIA – A Queer Feminist LBT Collective, published a couple of short stories, and is co-author of ‘No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy’ (Zubaan, 2015). She spends much of her free (and a good part of her not-so-free) time reading crime and detective fiction, and uses feminism as a touchstone.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

37 MUSINGS OF AN AXOLOTL

C.S.LAKSHMI

Blowing in the Wind

Bob Dylan has gone underground much to the annoyance

of the Nobel Committee which is determined to celebrate whether he comes to take the Nobel prize or not. The announcement about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize also led to a lot of discussion on whether song writing can be considered poetry or not. Many of us who had grown up with his songs and still feel nostalgic about songs like Blowing in the Wind feel that the lyrics of the song are still relevant and mean so much: How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand?

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38 Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they’re forever banned ?

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many years can a mountain exist Before it’s washed to the sea?

Yes, how many years can some people exist Before they’re allowed to be free?

Yes, how many times can a man turn his head Pretending he just doesn’t see?

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many times must a man look up Before he can see the sky?

Yes, how many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry?

Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

It is a beautiful song but it is a song and not poetry, many felt. There were also those who said that Tagore’s Gitanjali was also Song Offerings, after all. And another fact Tagore would have in common with Bob Dylan in case Bob Dylan does not attend the award function, is that Tagore also did not attend the award function.

He received the Nobel Prize a year after, in 1914, in a function organised in Calcutta. And he did not deliver an acceptance speech either. Some eight years later, in 1921, when he was in Stockholm, he invited the Nobel Committee members and gave a speech which has been seen as his acceptance speech.

Like the discussions that have ensued about Bob Dylan deservThe Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

39 ing the Nobel Prize there were also misgivings about the Nobel Prize given to Tagore. It was generally known that Tagore’s friendship with W. B. Yeats and the ardent admiration and support of Yeats who was everything poetry stood for those times, made the Nobel Prize possible. In his introduction to the English translation that was published, Yeats wrote: ‘I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses, and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics, which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical inventiondisplay in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long.

The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.” He was also sure that these verses “…will not lie in little well-printed books upon ladies’ tables, who turn the pages with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life, or be carried by students at the university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but, as the generations pass, travelers will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon the rivers.’

So Yeats also felt that Tagore’s verses will not be just read but will also be sung by common people. Tagore had worked closely with Yeats on the translation of Gitanjali and according to some Yeats had worked hard to improve the English translation of Tagore. And Yeats seems to have claimed later that almost the entire translation of Gitanjali was his work. Be that as it may, the Nobel Prize to a song-writer has given hopes to many lyricists in Tamil Nadu.

In fact, the rumour goes that Vairamuthu, the well-known poet and lyricist, made a trip a few years ago to meet the Nobel Committee and later claimed that he had knocked at the door of the Nobel Committee. He also, in anticipation of the Nobel Prize, got his poems translated into English and officially released it, they say. Being translated into English has been the need of many Tamil writers for The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

40 quite some time now for there is a general feeling that being translated into English is the only way one can enter the literary arena of the world and then there is always the hope that one day the Nobel Prize for literature would come their way through a good translation of their work. Hence the haste of Vairamuthu to be translated.

Leaving aside such speculations, some excellent translations of Tamil poetry have been done by Lakshmi Holmstrom, Subhashree Krishnaswamy and K Srilata (The Rapids of a Great River) and by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling (‘A Second Sunrise’, a collection of R. Cheran’s poems and ‘Lost Evenings, Lost Lives’, a collection of poems about Sri Lanka’s civil war). These books were received very well and many who have enjoyed excellent poetry written by contemporary Tamil poets feel that there is a great need to translate these poems into English for they belong to the category of world literature. In the last few decades a lot of poetry has been written but very few English publishers venture to publish poetry collections. One would always miss a translator like Lakshmi Holmstrom for the fervour with which she took up translation of both poetry and fiction.

There are many Tamil poets whose poetry has become a part of my life but recently I played with the idea of translating a few poems of Manushyaputhiran and Jamsith Zaman, a very young Sri Lankan poet, and realised that their poetry needs to be translated into English for the agony, loneliness, sorrow and the underlying intricate complexities they reflect are universal and that they are what the world is going through now and not just that of two persons in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu. Three poems of Manushyaputhiran touch upon the deep loneliness of modern life: Why does your mind wilt so much When you come back home To see no one there?

Is it because you have stayed for so long In a house where there is no one?

Or is it because Someone has lived in that house before this?

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41 Or is it because In the house with no one Someone is living Without your knowledge?

My problem is different I open the door every day And enter the house where no one lives This world tells me something every day To be conveyed I hang my shirt on the hanger And come and stand in the hall With scattered objects And start telling the image on the mirror The message conveyed by this world to me I have no other complaints except that It looks like me.

The Shore Across You could have been The bride’s maid Or one of those henna appliers In your lover’s wedding You could have been One of those offering the traditional take-away Standing with a folded up veshti In your beloved’s wedding No one has time To let the eyes blur with tears To go to a secluded spot and cry The scenes move so fast With flowers falling from the garlands Fall some secret kisses The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

42 With the sandalwood paste applied May come the fragrance of another body Look, how effortless our times are!

To go from one shore to another We have convenient bridges Occasionally someone jumps off that bridge Other than that There seem to be no other complications The Plant of Sorrow Believing that with Non-stop writing I can cross my private darkness With constant talking I can get over my madness With relentless crying I can melt my deep sorrows How foolish I have been!

I realised On the day I found out These are plants That grow even as you trim them I now Calmly water them With a long hose Jamsith Zaman’s poems are more like spontaneous expressions of wonderment and at times laments about living in a space where even nature seems lost even while it offers succour. Here are a few: When the street light and I are Conversing at the crossroads The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

43 Night begins to come down A person who has no time For conversation With a street light Goes away drenched in the night I too must go home Only by spreading the moon And holding it aloft 2.

I allowed a lonely path To go into the forest It lost its way Birds returning to roost Brought the path with them And left it at my feet And went their way 3.

I peep into a ruined well A blurred image Of a jumping monsoon frog Light green moss spreading On the edges of the wall Butterflies Swarming around Flying I become a child And shout My name which no lips can call out right The well echoes 4.

The whole night I kept sleep beside me Watching it Not a word was spoken The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

44 5.

Just a while ago I got out of the world I was wearing And put on my room And I stand Preening before the mirror Tight clothes suit my body More than loose ones Please Don’t wear Clothing I have cast off 6.

A path is Travelling alone In my poem These are not poems which are songs that can be sung like that of Kabir, Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sahir Ludhianwi, Javed Akhtar, Gulzar or our own Pattukottai Kalyanasundaram or Kannadasan.

These are poems which you would read when you are alone by yourself allowing them to envelop you and consume you. When the Syrian poet Adonis recites, ‘Maybe there is no love on earth / Except the one we imagine’, like a friend of mine wrote, it breaks your heart; it melts your soul. And in that moment when you allow poetry to take you over, there is no sound; only silence within and without.

C S Lakshmi is a researcher and a writer who writes in the pen name - Ambai.

She is one of the founder trustees of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) and currently its director.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

45 PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

YONASON GOLDSON

How to End a Conversation A classic riddle asks: Using three periods (.), two commas

(,), and one question mark (?), punctuate the following line to produce a logical and grammatically correct sentence: That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is If you know the answer, don’t text it to your friends. You might hurt their feelings.

However, just between us, here’s the solution: That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.

The beauty of a brainteaser like this one is not just that it gets us to think. More important, it gets us to think about thinking, to appreciate how communication is critical to critical thinking, and to think about how the same string of words can be fashioned into a cogent message or left as a meaningless hodgepodge of phonetic symbols.

But don’t say so out loud. You might offend someone.

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46 That’s what Professor Celia Klin and researchers at Binghamton University found when they asked undergraduates to interpret text messages responding to an invitation. Their study revealed that students perceived responses properly punctuated with a period at the end as less sincere and, in some cases, psychologically combative.

In other words, it’s antisocial to be articulate, crass to follow convention, and reprobate to observe the rules.

According to simple logic, it should be just the opposite. The effectiveness of purely verbal communication has always been overestimated. When not compensated for by the compositional genius of, say, an Orwell, a Hemingway, or a Salinger, the absence of vocal intonation and facial expression renders the written word subject to all kinds of potential misinterpretation. The reason literate society invented written punctuation was to offset the inherent deficiency of non-oral communication.

So now that we rely more than ever on terse exchanges with minimal context, one would only expect a heightened sense of dependence upon meticulous grammar and syntax.

But it’s just the opposite. Capital letters are an endangered species. Vowels are threatened with extinction. And punctuation marks belong in a museum of antiquities, with the medieval catapult, the ox-drawn plow, and the corded telephone.

In place of verbal convention, the webisphere has tried to enhance messaging with ‘emojis’ and the like, with predictably mixed results. The panoply of little yellow faces has left many ‘texters’ and ‘posters’ overwhelmed, while leaving those on the receiving end frequently baffled and occasionally irate.

But there’s no going back. Just as bastardized words such as irregardless, flammable, and ginormous have gained acceptance as legitimate building blocks of English expression, so too has the period suffered the indignity of slanderous denunciation and extirpation.

Ironically, the very same age of technology that is rendering The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

47 the period defunct has simultaneously grown hyper-dependent upon it. Where would the world be without dot-com, dot-org, and dot.edu? And so I say to all of you who seek to banish the period to the recycling bin of history, how long would you survive without that precious little dimensionless speck of indispensable information?

And there, perhaps, is the silver lining. Even if we no longer dot our eyes, sign on the dotted line, or properly demarcate the conclusion of our sentences, there is comfort in knowing that the period will survive, perhaps even after civilization itself has crumbled into linguistical dust.

But even if we accept that the times are a-changin’, what does it say about us that we take offense at something as diminutive as a tiny dot? Is it any wonder that our fragile collective self-esteem now necessitates a whole movement of militant political correctness to protect us from every perceived affront, like the recent madness at Virginia’s James Madison University: When college students require administrative intervention to protect them from such offensive statements as you have such a pretty face, I know exactly how you feel, and love the sinner, hate the sin, it’s time for us to either wrap ourselves in bubble wrap or enter a cryogenic chamber and wait for the return of sanity.

Of course, people need to be civil and sensitive. But awareness cannot be enacted by legislation, any more than cluelessness can be eradicated by government fiat. Sometimes we have to live with the social clumsiness of others. It’s called life. Get over it.

Debasing the language in pursuit of social justice is not only ineffective; it is self-destructive. When we erase from our culture the means of self-expression, we simultaneously destroy our own ability to engage in complex thought and purposeful debate. The inevitable result is that predicted in George Orwell’s 1984, where the implementation of ‘Newspeak’ would eventually reduce the general populace to such a limited and tightly controlled vocabulary that higher thought, especially anti-government thought, would become an intellectual impossibility.

Taken far enough, the demise of grammar and syntax might The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

48 one day become truly fatal.

You’ve probably heard the one about the panda who walked into a restaurant and ordered dinner from the menu. As soon as he finished, he took out a pistol and gunned down the waiter, then headed for the door.

The manager ran over and cried, “Hey, you shot my waiter.”

The panda replied, “What do expect? I’m a panda.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked the manager.

“I’m a panda. Look it up.” And with that, the panda walked out onto the street.

Uncertain what else to do, the manager pulled out his phone and Googled “panda.” He found the following definition: Panda. [pan-duh] a white-and-black, bearlike mammal, rare and restricted to forest areas of central China. Eats shoots and leaves.

If we don’t mind our grammar, we might be next.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson, a talmudic

scholar and former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, a keynote speaker with 3000 years’ experience and newspaper columnist, lives with his wife in St.Louis, Missourie, where he teaches, writes, and lectures.

His latest book, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages, is available on Amazon.

Visit him at http://proverbsandprovidence.com.

The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

49

MACEDONIAN LITERATURE

An Introduction to Macedonian Contemporary Poetry

Zoran Anchevski POETRY:

Katica ÐŒulavkova Lidija Dimkovska Nikola Madzirov Tihomir Janchovski Zoran Anchevski Vladimir Martinovski FICTION:

OLIVERA KJORVEZIROSKA Associated by USHA AKELLA The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

50

Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

Zoran Anchevski Since ancient times, Macedonia has been a rewarding ground

for the spirit of culture. For millennia on end, this region has been a crossroad of diverse civilizations and cultures, a witness of their rise and fall. Therefore, its long cultural history can be regarded as a profound and exciting palimpsest with many layers of cultural artifacts, signs, and traces. Although the outcomes of history have most often been much more tragic for the Macedonian people than for their neighbors, their cultural and literary traditions have shown great endurance and persistence, especially in the long period after the fall of the Macedonian state in 1014, through the times of Byzantine and Ottoman rule, until its renewal in 1945.

The period after WWII is usually considered to be the essential foundation upon which Macedonian contemporary poetry has started its tremendous growth. It took almost a century long effort on behalf of a number of Macedonian patriots, intellectuals and writers before the Macedonian language was eventually codified and standardized. The codification triggered not only its swift development, but also the development of literature in general.

However, the roots that enabled such growth go much deeper in the cultural history of the Macedonian people. They reach as far back as 9th century and the ‘Words of Praise’ by St. Clement of Ohrid, a Macedonian and Slavic poet and educator who was the founder of the first Slavic university in the holy city of Ohrid (the second Jerusalem for the Slavic world). The sacral and hymnic energy that radiates with light and love from his ‘Words of Praise’, makes its way as if flowing through some atavistic passages and reaches contemporary Macedonian poetry.

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with Macedonian history The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

51 and culture will remember that poetry has always been its hallmark.

It is a kind of permanent condition of the Macedonian literary language brought to boiling point; it is – to put it metaphorically – its syntax of pain. It is the definiens of Macedonian culture and especially literature, its most significant area. In the tradition of the Macedonian culture as a whole, besides poetry, there is an extraordinarily rich tradition of wood-carving, fresco-painting, music, architecture, filigree work, and folk art (national costumes, customs and rituals).

Nevertheless, poetry appears as the cultural fact that maintains the most vigorous relationship with that folk tradition. It has maintained a constant hypertextual bond of the most varied kind (i.e. ranging from quotation and paraphrase to travesty and parody) with the mythical and archetypal elements developed within the tradition of the oral poetic idiom.

The artistic poetic tradition grew alongside the existing oral tradition, but the real poetic revival happened during the 19th century with the poetic works of Konstantin Miladinov, Rajko Zhinzifov and Grigor Prlichev. Miladinov was a fine lyrical poet in the Romantic tradition who died prematurely in a Turkish prison. He and his brother Dimitar compiled and published in 1861 the famous ‘Miscellany of Folk Poetry’, one of the major national treasures rightfully called ‘the Golden Book of Macedonian poetic revival’.

Zhinzifov is a powerful patriotic poet, and Prlichev is perhaps the most famous Macedonian poet of the time whose unparalleled epic-narrative poem written in modern Greek (demotiki) and not in his mother tongue (Macedonian) was awarded the laurel wreath at a prestigious poetic contest in Athens where he studied. These strong 19th century poetic figures provide the threshold for the appearance of the contemporary poets immediately before and after WWII. The founder of modern Macedonian poetry is Kosta Racin whose White Dawns (1939) finally announces the merging of the linguistic and stylistic norm which proves to be an indispensable ground for the appearance of the three central figures among the post war poets: Blazhe Koneski, Aco Shopov and Slavko Janevski. The works of these three poets, who remained very active in the period that folThe Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

52 lowed, had crucial influence on the further development of Macedonian poetic discourse, including the most recent generations of poets. The poets of the 50s (such as Mateja Matevski, Ante Popovski, Gane Todorovski), and especially those of the 60s (Radovan Pavlovski, Bogomil Gjuzel, Petre M. Andreevski, Vladas Uroshevik, Jovan Koteski, Petre M. Andreevski, Mihail Rendzov, etc.) opened their work for influences from more developed literary traditions (e.g.

Russian, English, French, German, etc.,) and readily embraced the modern poetic trends in the world. The stylistic plurality of contemporary Macedonian poetry, however, is most evident in the works of the postmodernist poets such as: Eftim Kletnikov, Milosh Lindro, Katica Ќulavkova, Vera Chejkovska, Zoran Anchevski, Lidija Dimkovska, etc. Besides stylistic plurality, contemporary Macedonian poetry can also boast with linguistic plurality, as the poets who belong to ethnic minority groups (Albanian, Roma, Turkish, etc.) write in their mother tongues.

Through this pioneering and therefore modest selection of poetry by six contemporary Macedonian poets (with an emphasis on the youngest among them), the reader can still appreciate the vivid palimpsestic continuation of traditional archetypal works and the re-creation of those mythical clichés, as well as their parody and even travesty. As already mentioned above, a good deal of contemporary Macedonian poetry has also grown from well-known mythical matrices from other cultures and civilizations, from other archives and archaeological records and/or ‘imaginary’ museums of the world. Finally, some of the contemporary poetry displays a rather marked metalinguistic instance of the poetic discourse, or a special model emphasizing the ‘materiality’ and self-referentiality of the poem. The openness of contemporary Macedonian poetry toward a variety of foreign influences is also enhanced by the 46 years old international Struga Poetry Festival, which annually brings together more than 60 foreign and domestic poets. It is one of the most popular and certainly one of the best poetry festivals worldwide.

This selection, certainly, cannot present the full spectrum of The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

53 the Macedonian poetic idiom, which is very rich by being diverse and different. Bearing in mind that its rapid development started only with the codification of the Macedonian literary language, it had to engulf as much as possible en route. Therefore, the main bulk of contemporary Macedonian poetry, as it appears today, consists of poetry that cherishes a peculiar blend of traditional and avant-garde features, of a confessional idiom wedded together with a strong intellectual propensity, riotous non-conformism and dissidentism, hymns to daily occurrences and hymns to sacred occurrences, harsh realism and sophisticated magic realism, intertextualism, postmodernism, elements of Dadaism and verbal eccentricity, as well as experiments in visual and projective verse, seeking to replace traditional ideals of poetic form with open or natural structures.

It contains philosophical commentaries, elitism, narcissism, regionalism, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, etc. It simply comprises the whole wealth and paraphernalia stored in the semiotic treasure-chest of the Macedonian poetic tradition that goes back to the establishment of its literacy in the 9th century – and even further, to the misty eons of oral transmission of poetic creation.

Thus contemporary Macedonian poetry echoes the sounds of the first legends, myths, prayers, sermons, damascenes, the voices of the first Macedonian scopes and minstrels, as well as the voices of 19th century romanticism and 20th century realism, modernism and postmodernism. * * * The poetry of Katica ĐŒulavkova (1951) is perhaps a paramount example of this constant and most difficult task to provide a poetic expression which best communicates with the past traditions and the schizophrenic present.

That is why her poetry often echoes the voice of alarm and warning about the threats and dangers that lurk from beneath our common understanding of the personal and the universal vision of the world; it moves along the sharp dividing line between past and present, reality and The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

54 illusion, ritual and routine. Her bold poetic experiment does not leave anyone indifferent, but causes shivers of excitement and awe,“leaves marks and tattoos on the [reader’s] soul” (L.Kapushevska-Drakulevska, 2004). Ќulavkova’s poetic expression is “sharp, even arrogant, detached from the existing sentimentalist and confessional expression… it has become recognized by its use of remarkable capacity of erudition and intellect” (S. Anastasova, 2005). Thus she is capable of triggering off a number of theoretical concepts in her poetry, “which are subtly ‘sheltered’… and do not ‘stifle’ the poems, but make them ponder further about themselves” (K. Nikolovska, 2006).

As for the poetry of Zoran Anchevski (1954), a critic has said that it is a “brutal detection of a time which can ‘boast’ only of its crisis of identity in which reaching for the ‘dead quote’ from the past is the only compensation of this culture... According to his choice of mythological matrices (most often from the ancient Greek mythological paradigm) and according to the cynicism and bitterness of his conclusions that today’s world is but a perverted, poor paraphrase of the heroic, mythical childhood of mankind, Anchevski’s poetry aligns itself with the most significant poetic discourses in contemporary Macedonian poetry. He demonstrates, however, his own differentia specifica which, from a broader point of view, is a general feature of post-modernist poetic discourse; this lies in his semiotic exaltation, which in the end becomes a semiotic resignation, a radical skepticism in the potential of the signifying systems” (V. Andonovski: 1996). Anchevski is a poet-reader… who makes it clear that “poetry itself ‘learns’ how to read from what poetry is not. In that way, poetry itself becomes ‘a reader’.” (K. Nikolovska, 2006).

Tihomir Janchovski (1967) has been given the epithet of an ‘urban myth-teller’. His poems do not ‘pass judgment’ but only ‘record and (re) member’ the experiences which mark The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

55 our present reality. It has also been said that his poetry possesses a superb duality: it ‘teaches us of verbal simplicity’ and yet ‘recreates the magnificent complexity of our world.’

No matter what their subject, his poems ‘give energetic value to the seemingly prosaic, trivial details’ that make up our life. That is the reason why his poetry ‘never strays away from maintaining a direct link with his audiences’ (B. Gligorova: 2005) Lidija Dimkovska (1971) belongs to the new generation of poets who, very much like Kulavkova before, burst open the rather timid tradition of poetry written by women for a bolder, even hazardous experimentation based on dynamic, avalanche-like poetic exhortations full of exuberant humor, multilayered thematic texturing, and intimate outpours.

Her poetry teems with humor, dark sarcasm, unexpected shifts of voice and tone, ranging from harmonious sequences (most often used for the purpose of parodying other poetic discourses) to consciously elaborated disharmonies, which give her poems the effect of frantic and illusory prosaic quality. The palette of her themes is inexhaustible: she skillfully combines and recombines seemingly absurd topics and makes ‘porridge out of eternal meanings’.

The poetry of Nikola Madzirov (1973) is often critically regarded as a ‘journey of initiation’ through the subterranean corridors of the city, a Dionysian, mythic quest for the ‘other’ in order to give voice to the poetic curiosity and unease that result from it. This takes him into the Borgesian labyrinthine library of our civilization, but also into the ‘rag-and-bone-shop of the heart’ (as W. B. Yeats would put it).

The poetry of Nikola Madzirov is therefore highly intellectual and resolutely personal, both learned and deeply felt. The exciting “stylistic playfulness in the poetic world of Nikola Madzirov is found in the opposition between the static urban and fathomless oneiric horizons” (E. Kletnikov, 1999).

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56 Vladimir Martinovski (1974) belongs to the younger generation of Macedonian poets who is profusely dedicated to the short poetic forms such as haiku and tanka, which, interesting enough (together with the sonnet), have recently become favorite forms among several poets of different generations.

At the same time Martinovski’s minute forms are often intertextual invocations of other artists’ écriture (no matter whether they are poets or visual artists) such as Basho, Koneski, Chinese and Japanese painters, etc. His other poetry is also indebted to the ‘haiku reflections’ and is characterized by powerful visual and auditory imagination.

This poetry establishes strong relationship between the micro and the macrocosm, following the analogy of universal interrelated ness. In this way his poetry saves from oblivion even the most common daily experiences, no matter how mechanical and trivial they may be. * * * As an addendum to the metaphor of the treasure-chest of the Macedonian poetic tradition I could say that traditionally the most valuable items in our households were kept in special, beautifully carved and painted wooden chests. Those were possessions passed down from one generation to another, from mother to daughter, from father to son.

On this occasion we have opened the treasure-chest and taken out as a present what we believed would be worth to see the light of another cultural context, of another language and find its place in another poetic tradition. The beauty of the task of choosing lay in the fact the there is something to choose from. The treasure-chest of contemporary Macedonian poetry contains great plenitude and can offer presents for everyone’s taste, because its lid is neither closed nor locked, because it is very much alive and vibrant, neither thrown away nor buried in the rubble of our civilization.

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57

Poems by Katica Ќulavkova

TRAP - From One Dream On to Another -

I still come back home empty-handed, in vain as if I had missed out on something very important I keep to(ing) and fro(ing) the eel is slipping away the paradise apple is drooling the dandelion parachutes are falling I’m wasting my time chasing apparitions, seeking a way out in the meantime the snakes have conquered the lake the ghosts - the shrine.

‘Existence makes sense only because man is mortal’ I think to myself though sensing I’m not all by myself.

‘Neither am I with all those who I love, God’.

- Translated by Igor Popovski & Nina Kontevska The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

58

I feel like writing you a letter tightly-knit, hand-written handed over in person but there is a distance between us, so hopeless that I can in no way ignore it, so I practice illusionism and it all becomes effortless the clash of civilisations becomes easier to bear I go back to the old technologies telepathy is faster than the internet it is a universal wireless network an archetypal cobweb there’s no escape from what’s written by default, from the tallies and sketches on the memory cards of the zodiac, of the kingdom of symbolical creatures numbers, angles and allusions, bewildered, I don’t know if I should laugh or weep.

- Translated by Igor Popovski & Nina Kontevska The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

59

Anxiety “Materi, I have grown fond of the other side for I am a mortal being a shadow of the essence the time has come for me not to love life the way I did, Dear I fill my time with emptiness this is no longer a quest it is walking with obstacles, up and downs, reality has become an apparition I communicate with the dead more than I do with the living I’ve begun moving like the nomads from one region to the next I’ve lost track of the differences only a wandering thought or two about divinity resurrects in my consciousness not a desire for immortality but a recognition of mortality.

I can say it now:

my soul is at ease.

Whenever she is ready I, too, am ready”.

Translated by Igor Popovski

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60

The Wild Horses on Mount Galicica “Our freedom is a tyrant yet we, dependent on the wilderness, (in blood and in spirit) keep subduing to it – We ride ecstatically without a saddle, without harness, without rest we are never still we are never sleepy – We storm across the ridge under the arching sky like a passionate lass on top of a brawny man – Our days and nights ignore the counting of the clock space is what charms us we have the eyes of a fish overlooking two lakes one of them white, the other – black we are not given the choice to settle down.

We are a herd of untamed stallions mares, fillies The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

61 always in two minds, uncertain home-thirsty, seeking refuge in a tame wasteland peaceful sweetness in a dark shriek.

Grown weary of freedom – self-seeking, wildly galloping crests – enslaved by nature, we flee terrified of our own shadow we shriek, bleat, tramp, run wild always on the run, yet always here we must never be tamed we breed in fear we foal in fear even love means facing fear tremor and dread in the hall of natural death.

Watch us from afar, Tamer, show us freedom’s mild face give us some love for we know not where more to go with this excess of freedom!”

Translated by Igor Popovski The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

62

Broken, Devout “We no longer have the freedom we used to have we have become a shadow of the shadow of life a language forgotten without people to speak it deprived of delusions deprived of ourselves of the charm of primordial joy deprived of the right to live deprived tired of all laws and threats of all musts and shoulds of patience and suffering broken O God, as if devout disbelievers irreparably broken perfectly broken diseased, dead, rustling in the words dry leaves crumbling to ashes crushhhhhhhhhh shhhhhhhhhhhttt psssssssssssssttt ------------------“ Translated by Igor Popovski The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

63

Confession What forces me to invent hush add relocate alter?

Death’s hoof jolts me, makes me spill even now, I cannot hide it, my urges out of their bed rising like well-kneaded dough like well-shaken champagne Every night I wait to hear God’s voice between the lines and remember My memory is bulked flowing over the brim surging lava I’d give a kingdom for a good poem I don’t need consolation so long as the Prompter is giving me the verses, line by line.

Translated from Macedonian by Igor Popovski, and transcreated by Veronica Golos & Catherine Strisik The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

64

Warm Blood I don’t know how to tell a single tale calmly. Why, for example dose the hunter who saves Little Red Riding Hood, like any other small character necessary for the denouement, have to leave in the end?

How is it possible that The Flower The ugly beast turns into a handsome young man?

Which one of them is an illusion?

Am I touched by the magic of change or the eerie feeling that I must suffer in disgrace before I become loved by someone?

How many people in the world remain unchanged, men mostly because the woman is the one who connects them?

The man is desired for, the women too and so the excitement of telling goes on endlessly the language becomes warm like blood blossoming lasciviously hardening the obscene The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

65 twisting like an eel perfect when naked without a shirt, a shell as if just born from the womb.

Oh, let my tale be shameless let disharmony be eternal, between the appearance and the essence there are tales of magic where everything is so real where there is nothing I could tell with calm and indifference!

Translated by Zoran Anchevski English language editor Adam Reed

Katica Ќulavkova was born in Veles, Macedonia,

in 1951. She studied literature at the University of ‘Cyril and Methodius’ in Skopje, at the Sorbonne, and at the University of Zagreb. Her first book of poems appeared in 1975. Since then, she has published more than twenty books of poetry (into Macedonian original and in translation), as well as two collections of short stories, one play, and approximately forty other books, as both author and editor. She has received numerous Macedonian literary awards. She is Professor of Theory of Literature, Literary Hermeneutics and Creative Writing at the University of Skopje, a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Art (since 2003), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Salzburg, since 2014), and a Vice President of PEN International (since 2008). She lives in Skopje.

She is founder of Diversity Collection of poetry, fiction & essay (www.diversity.org.mk).

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66

Poems by Zoran Anchevski HISTORY When the moon is a peeled orange dripping-heavy at night— Minerva, the owl, flies away blindly into darkness— careful, pedantic— joyfully listening to every murmur of the previous day, following every spasm in dreams overhearing every sigh of love quietly without disturbing anything— and, with satellite-precision attacks her victims.

During the day when the sun is a dazzling cauldron tintinabulating across the sky, when we are in haste, unable to greet each other; when we have no time to see one another, or, to see who is there, or missing; she is resting at ease in its burrow, masticating, consuming her prey.

Translated by Sudeep Sen and the author The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

67

TRANSLATION Word by word I translate the dead into living, bones into meat, winters into summers, molehills into mountains.

I shed the snake’s skin, tailor angel’s wings.

I am the word’s judge who remains unseen within the text.

I sleep on a pillow of someone else’s dreams; I wake up, to a Good morning— in dead tongues.

I translate day into night the past into present— oblivion into memory, today into tomorrow, but did not anticipate the cruel desiccating act, the fact that with every translated breath I lose my very own, spend myself, waste myself unknowingly, floating word by word into another context.

So now, I’m expected to transport the thirsty across the river The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

68 without getting wet, without being quenched.

I neither have the breath, nor words, nor hands, to translate my own pain into sadness, happiness— plenitude— stop, enough.

Translated by Sudeep Sen with the author

I AM A BOTTLE submerged— two-thirds in the sea.

I contain no messages for the world— only digits designating my birth-date.

I do not feel the greedy hands gripping my chilled body, nor parched lips thirsting— ‘O’ thirsting, for my mouth— I hear no words of praise for the bosom-fluid I bore.

I float, emptied of myself, of the soothing liquid-dark that matured, aging in the cellar.

Ebbs, tides of life have swept me to unknown shores, exhausted me into oblivion.

Now, I yearn for a storm, its gait gathering in the garden— the sea grabbing my throat, burying me in deep waters to find, finally, my peace.

Translated by Sudeep Sen with the author The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

69

A Diptych for Pain 1.

What hurts most?

The history of the wind hurts most written nowhere, remembered by no one, yet ubiquitous— if touched by it you remain without name or surname to defend yourself- no bow and arrow to conquer memories, only the mute cries of your ancestors behind the mirror.

It hurts most when one among us leaves to toil in the deep mines of the future where the morning desire for a warm and smiling body that opens to welcome you like a broad map of your homely hearth— grows old in an instant.

It hurts most when one among us starts to weep and there’s no one to witness his tears but stray dogs whose nightly howls send them to the bosom of the tightly buttoned garment of night seamed with stars.

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70 2.

What hurts least?

The rhythm of drums hurts least for it tickles the sole of our feet and sets mirrors in our blood to hasten the dance of happiness.

The whip of the word hurts least uttered in velvet twilight lulled in a nest of nightingales… …the squeaking hinges that let love in through the gate.

Translated by the author

SURVIVAL Having exhausted every possibility of any future at this time rejecting it like an empty shell like a used rubber we set off in search of a surrogate self But the past is a yoke impossible to deal with an absolute controversy a civilized invention to unify views to channel thoughts and wash brains— a biological need of oxen The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

71 The past is a dead quote a transcript a carrion we devour like vultures each tugging at its own piece scared lest we lose ourselves lest our corpuscles blacken lest our sight desiccate and our brood perish Every possibility is exhausted the heroes are weary decimated the search unavailing Silently Covertly we retreat into the shadow of our skins into our cocoon for permanent hibernation Translated by Peggy and Graham Reid and the author Zoran Anchevski graduated in English language and literature from the Faculty of Philology at SkopjeUniversity, where he currently teaches British and American literature. He received his M.A. in American literature from California State University, and Ph.D in comparative literature from Skopje University.

Selections from his poetry have been translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, French, Finnish, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, etc. and published in various magazines and anthologies at home and abroad.

Member of Macedonian Writers’ Union, Literary Federation for World Peace (member of the International Advisory Board), two times secretary of Macedonian P.E.N., and former president of the Organizing Board of the renowned Struga International Poetry Festival (2002-2007) The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

72

Poems by Tihomir Janchovski February, Lake This morning it rained Then, it rained again Then rain and snow - sleet And finally only rain, pouring out And dripping from the drain gutter In the afternoon, slowly, The clouds lifted off The mountain is looming dark The sky is light And the lake glistens Darker than the sky And lighter than the mountain

I Saw Myself Old In a Dream Last night I saw myself old in a dream: A familiar face framed with grey beard and white hair and a body frame donned in a grey suit and white shirt carrying a walking cane and years 78 In my dream I was dressed to go to the place of no return The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

73 and this made me blissfully happy and somehow serene….

Women with pinned up hair and all dressed up were huddled around me with gaping eyes They warned me not to say that because My time has not come…. yet But squeezing their hands eagerly I greeted them anxiously because I loathed my old life and had no misgivings forgoing it In my dream it was day, a very bright one…

And I told them I’d be going back but we’d see each other where I’m going because they, too, we’ll come one day…

And that was it. Only a dream.

That was the first time I had a dream like that because never before had I seen myself old in a dream.

Free Choice Hello. I have a free choice: When I get up to shave off my head and shoutCock a doodle doo. But I don’t.

I make a choice not to do it. Every day.

When I get out on the street, I have a choice to cut off a piece of asphalt and eat it up. And I don’t cut it off.

When I sleep, I have a choice to dream nice things only. And I do.

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74 When I measure myself I have a choice to grow another 20 centimeters. And I do. Now I am 3.45.

When I play, I have a choice to grow two more fingers to play the guitar more dexterously.

And so I become a virtuoso.

When I play sports, I have a choice to turn into a bird and fly… and so on…

This is my life I don’t know about you, but I am free Totally free

Immovable Asset I am an immobile man, a fixed object, I can reach, with my left hand one meter to the left With my right hand one meter to the right And half a meter down, and that’s all (all the measures are taken from the edge of the bed) In height, I can grip one bar To straighten up my torso When they lift me to prop up the pillow…

A bed urinal is my front yard, a bed pan - my back yard Wet wipes - my wash basin Cotton swabs with alcohol – my fountain Who has not felt it on his own skin does not know what it is like And he’d better not know… what good would it do to him?

My back is pinned down to the mattress with springs For days it has been itching and languishing me My legs stay put obediently, the left one completely, The right one is folded in the knee, But my brain is lucid, and that’s what matters.

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75 Come to think of it, I am like a tree, replanted From a huge yard into a flower-pot The bed –soil, the back – roots, The hands - limbs, my torso the trunk…

This tree cannot grow any longer, except, Maybe, accrue new tree rings in the width…

My thoughts are like leaves; They come, ripen, linger for a while, fall off, And then the flurry of new ones, and then new ones, And so on, forever, infinitely Only, thoughts do not rot, They do not swirl down on the bed linen and do not wilt away…

And so I replenish the invisible space In the room, city, planet, Universe….

Some thoughts come back, some depart irretrievably And so I exist (as Descartes would put it) I am an immovable asset, a fixed object A God’s creation, with a body and a soul, And with a new part, a replacement (titanium prosthetics ) Made by a human hand.

THREE-LEGGED When I was relearning to walk with crutches I walked, no, better said, I stomped laboriously, Hobbling with one of my own legs And two other legs assisting, Almost like a child Riding a tricycle This new three-legged experience The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

76 Brought back a memory of A conversation I had with a carpenter, Not that long ago, I needed a stool - you knowA chair without a back, something simple An extra stool to seat on Anyway, Three or four legs – the carpenter asked me, I leave it up to you – I said, And as an after-thought, added, Whichever is sturdier…

Then three – he quickly responded - It won’t budge.

This reply, his response, left me dumbfounded.

Why, how on earth is three better than four?!

More legs means more stability – Why, everybody knows that….

Well, that was my logic, of course….

Damn me and my ‘even’ logic Four is two and two, and all legs have to be the same Lest they wobble, even if only one of them is different, And the ground, by all means, has to be even So that the chair does not tilt over and lean askew…

Three legs, on the other hand, this ‘odd’ combination, Regardless where you position them, And even if they are not the same (with each other) The stool, still, will never wobble…

Somehow it always finds a firm foothold Even or rugged surface, it doesn’t matter, There is no need for a bottle top To be stuck underneath or folded pieces of paper Wedged in on the uneven surface My, oh, my! Who would have thought it!

I tested it, and, sure enough, it was true, The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

77 A three-legged chair or a table does not wobble Not for an inch, no way.

Why then do they make four-legged chairs Instead of three-legged ones…and tables, for that matter, too?

What is it then: aesthetics, tradition, Or simply a conspiracy against humanity?

The whole thing seems ludicrous: Instead of chairs with three legs, For centuries people have been forced to sit on Chairs with two pairs of legs!!

And then - oh, what an epiphany struck me: What if man had been created with three legs?!

Imagine, imagine us only – with three legs!

Oh, boy, who would need A chair to sit on, a bed to lie on, a rear?

And a back ache? What was that?

And this is only the beginning: Walking would be an effortless exercise: Strut with two legs, rest the third, And when using all three, put the middle one forward, The other two together Marching in step harmoniously, one-three, one-three….

How bizarre: All this elaborate chimera born from learning to use walking aids And accompanying the good leg with two crutches It flanked with the two crutches on both sides It alone, they together, It forward, they in the back… a threesome synchronization Still, later on, When I mulled it over, I realized – it’s very complicated! (too crowded – too intricately cramped) The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

78 (Well, as they say: Too is a company, three is a crowd.)

Anyway, the threesome company would not work, With man, at least, Because three legs would require three arms, For symmetry, of course, Let’s not forget, balance is important And it, the three-armed chimera, Would certainly look ghoulish, But, hey, Enough, stop, man is not a stool. (no way…. no-can-do) While I was practicing walking with crutches, I slipped three times, on a wet floor, once I even fell over, And then I got hang of it and started walking adroitly Now … I’m waiting for it to recover… my dear leg…

Neither three nor four… two are two And they are mine.

Tihomir Janchovski, born 1967 in Skopje, Macedonia.

A poet, translator and historian. Before he was 30, he travelled, studied and lived all over Europe: Skopje, Bruxelles, Amsterdam, Skiathos Island, London, Budapest… Worked as a waiter, bar-tender, paper boy, laborer, musician, salesman on Covent Garden, teacher of French to the Englishmen. Studied Literature and History in Macedonia and Midlle Ages in Hungary.

From 1997 he permanently lives in Skopje and works as a translator and World History teacher. Although one of the most widely read poets in his country at the moment, he does not support himself through writing poems because Macedonia is a small country and has limited readership.

In so far, he has published 9 books of poetry and some of his poetic output was also published in English, Slovak, Serbian, and Albanian.

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Poems by Lidija Dimkovska Rubbish You collect stickers and shells with your children, and stamps and postcards, arrange them devotedly in drawers and boxes, smiling as your wife calls out “you’re only creating rubbish,” not knowing that suddenly a day will come or rather the night of that day when you will be staggering blindly in your underwear down the wet iron fire-escape.

Tottering away from your home, with hands as empty as a new-dug grave and fists black from beating the flames, you dive beyond the diameter of God’s will, looking behind you, and they are not there, a distant cry and a profound silence.

Naked and small under the hose that brings you back to life, while you shove it away, to die is all you want, to expire under the blanket behind the hedge.

They are dead.

You drag yourself to the rubbish bin where you threw the last rubbish yesterday.

With numb fingers you rummage the stench, there, the green plastic bag of orange peel, the silver paper from the chocolate you bought coming home from work, the end of the last salami and the crushed cartons the children drank their juice from before they went to bed: The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

80 all that is left of all of you, of your life where now you’re alone.

You smell them, kiss them, and restore each peel to wholeness, you gather the chocolate crumbs in the silver paper, the end of the salami makes you dizzy with its familiar homeliness, your children’s last saliva is on the drinking-straws.

This green plastic bag of rubbish is all that is yours now.

You need to start again from the beginning, they tell you, while you would know only how to start from the middle, how to change the old, make it better, nicer, more loved.

But when the dead are no longer alive nobody knows how to start from either the end or the beginning.

You know, you know very well, how life is turned into scraps of rubbish, but not how these scraps of rubbish can be turned into life.

Traveller Like in a New York taxi, divided by glass from the driver, that’s how I am with God in my life: he’s out of reach and so am I but we ride in the same direction.

Lynceus’s eye follows us both in the rear-view mirror.

It probes into us through heavens and earth, agastroscope that penetrates the tunnel of the being, bores into knowing and unknowing, a tiny camera filming the nonexistent life.

Only God has such sight too.

I am short-sighted, an ideal bride for Yahweh, and only when I become longsighted shall I be Christ’s.

I open the door myself, pick up my baggage.

It’s heavy, heavy but vital.

In the suitcase I carry my past, which often misses my destination, The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

81 my present is crammed in the holdall that hangs perilously over my head wherever I travel.

When I arrive there’s always someone to meet me.

And it is Him I look for in the throng, but my name is always on someone else’s signboard.

And as I dismally trudge behind the bearer of my burden, I ask myself – does God need a vitamin shot in the shoulder before I can lean on Him? Or is it me that needs it, before I can support Him in my own life?

The Prophets of Jerusalem The hotel beds are empty at night.

Jerusalem sobs.

Bodies in stamped hotel sheets wall up Christ.

Among them run receptionists calling out the names of guests.

And they sing, weep and laugh.

They are mad, these tourists are mad, blessed prophets of the 21st century.

They don’t want to go home anymore, they want to be married to God. In the restaurants they order fish and wine, and instead of feeding thousands of souls a fishbone and an empty glass gape before them.

In the morning they kneel, at noon they pray, in the evening they crawl.

They renounce what they are not to be what they are.

Holy Fools, prophets of the new world.

Their families wait for them, look for them, then declare them missing.

Their return tickets are not used, The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

82 their telephone numbers become non-existent, their hotel rooms are let to others.

Their relatives think them dead.

But they are alive, livelier than ever they roam around the walls of Jerusalem, eat grass and roots, doze in the bushes, capture sleep in the bags under their eyes, and the sky in their eyes.

Hands raised to God they sing Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Sabaoth, until a white van with bars stops by them, the hotel linen is replaced with hospital sheets, the report on the prophets is signed.

After forty days Jerusalem sends them home, not across the border, but through the skies.

What is it like to be a child of parents killed in war, to be a child of parents who’ve divorced, or an African child on a jumbo poster, to live in an institution for the handicapped, to have a key to a social housing flat, to receive aid in the form of flour, oil, sanitary towels and cotton buds, to have a bone marrow transplantation donation bank account in your name, to live in an SOS Village with a Big Mother of nine children and an auntie who comes once a week to iron clothes and play cards, to sleep in a cardboard box in front of the parliament or in the subway of a metropolis hosting a summit meeting, to be a doll in a traditional costume instead of a traffic policeman at the crossroads, what is it like when children adopt parents, and not the other way round, to down blood quickly before it oxidizes, to be the thyroid gland of the family politics, to be with people who make you drool, The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

83 and others who give you a lump in the throat, to keep the softest towel for the visitor from abroad, and the hardest bed for the suicide who has survived, to be sling-shot in God’s eye, to gather knowledge in a teaspoon of sticky syrup, to have views like washed stockings that cannot find their pairs, to feel that neither your skin nor the homeland fit you any more, to hang on a monastery lime tree the man who was the last to kiss you on the brow, to be the topical issue in a low-budget film, to have a belly-button that draws in before the tongue, and the tongue before the live measure of the spirit, to become a tenant of your own existence, to become aware that life is a non-swimmer’s game with waves higher than oneself.

Translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid Lidija Dimkovska (1971) belongs to the new generation of poets who, very much like Kulavkova before, burst open the rather timid tradition of poetry written by women for a bolder, even hazardous experimentation based on dynamic, avalanche-like poetic exhortations full of exuberant humor, multilayered thematic texturing, and intimate outpours. Her poetry teems with humor, dark sarcasm, unexpected shifts of voice and tone, ranging from harmonious sequences (most often used for the purpose of parodying other poetic discourses) to consciously elaborated disharmonies, which give her poems the effect of frantic and illusory prosaic quality. The palette of her themes is inexhaustible: she skillfully combines and recombines seemingly absurd topics and makes “porridge out of eternal meanings”.

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Poems by Nikola Madzirov HOME I lived at the edge of the town like a streetlamp whose light bulb no one ever replaces.

Cobwebs held the walls together, and sweat our clasped hands.

I hid my teddy bear in holes in crudely built stone walls saving him from dreams.

Day and night I made the threshold come alive returning like a bee that always returns to the previous flower.

It was a time of peace when I left home: the bitten apple was not bruised, on the letter a stamp with an old abandoned house.

From birth I’ve migrated to quiet places and voids have clung beneath me like snow that doesn’t know if it belongs to the earth or to the air.

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I DON’T KNOW Distant are all the houses I am dreaming of, distant is the voice of my mother calling me for dinner, but I run toward the fields of wheat.

We are distant like a ball that misses the goal and goes toward the sky, we are alive like a thermometer that is precise only when we look at it.

The distant reality every day questions me like an unknown traveller who wakes me up in the middle of the journey saying Is this the right bus?, and I answer Yes, but I mean I don’t know, I don’t know the cities of your grandparents who want to leave behind all discovered diseases and cures made of patience.

I dream of a house on the hill of our longings, to watch how the waves of the sea draw the cardiogram of our falls and loves, how people believe so as not to sink and step so as not to be forgotten.

Distant are all the huts where we hid from the storm and from the pain of the does dying in front of the eyes of the hunters who were more lonely than hungry.

The distant moment every day asks me Is this the window? Is this the life? and I say Yes, but I mean I don’t know, I don’t know if birds will begin to speak, without uttering A sky.

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AFTER US One day someone will fold our blankets and send them to the cleaners to scrub the last grain of salt from them, will open our letters and sort them out by date instead of by how often they’ve been read.

One day someone will rearrange the room’s furniture like chessmen at the start of a new game, will open the old shoebox where we hoard pyjama-buttons, not-quite-dead batteries and hunger.

One day the ache will return to our backs from the weight of hotel room keys and the receptionist’s suspicion as he hands over the TV remote control.

Others’ pity will set out after us like the moon after some wandering child.

SEPARATED I separated myself from each truth about the beginnings of rivers, trees, and cities.

I have a name that will be a street of goodbyes and a heart that appears on X-ray films.

I separated myself even from you, mother of all skies The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

87 and carefree houses.

Now my blood is a refugee that belongs to several souls and open wounds.

My god lives in the phosphorous of a match, in the ashes holding the shape of the firewood.

I don’t need a map of the world when I fall asleep.

Now the shadow of a stalk of wheat covers my hope, and my word is as valuable as an old family watch that doesn’t keep time.

I separated from myself, to arrive at your skin smelling of honey and wind, at your name signifying restlessness that calms me down, opening the doors to the cities in which I sleep, but don’t live.

I separated myself from the air, the water, the fire.

The earth I was made from is built into my home.

FAST IS THE CENTURY Fast is the century. If I were wind I would have peeled the bark off the trees and the facades off the buildings in the outskirts.

If I were gold, I would have been hidden in cellars, into crumbly earth and among broken toys, I would have been forgotten by the fathers, and their sons would remember me forever.

If I were a dog, I wouldn’t have been afraid of The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

88 refugees, if I were a moon I wouldn’t have been scared of executions.

If I wеre a wall clock I would have covered the cracks on the wall.

Fast is the century. We survive the weak earthquakes watching towards the sky, yet not towards the ground.

We open the windows to let in the air of the places we have never been.

Wars don’t exist, since someone wounds our heart every day.

Fast is the century.

Faster than the word.

If I were dead, everyone would have believed me when I kept silent.

Translated by Peggy Reid, Graham Reid, Magdalena Horvat & Adam Reed submitted from the poetry book ‘REMNANTS OF ANOTHER AGE’

Nikola Madzirov is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary European poetry. Born in a family of Balkan War refugees in Strumica in 1973, he grew up in the Soviet era in the former Republic of Yugoslavia ruled by Marshall Tito. When he was 18, the collapse of Yugoslavia prompted a shift in his sense of identity – as a writer reinventing himself in a country which felt new but was still nourished by deeply rooted historical traditions. The example and work of the great East European poets of the postwar period – Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert – were liberating influences on his writing and thinking. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel compared the quality of his poetry to Tomas Tranströmer’s. There is a clear line from their generation, and that of more recent figures like Adam Zagajewski from Poland, to Nikola Madzirov, but Madzirov’s voice is a new 21st century voice in European poetry and he is one of the most outstanding figures of the post-Soviet generation.

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Poems by Vladimir Martinovski IN THE LAND OF CAROUSELS In the Land of Carousels you get the dizziest if you’re standing still. In the Land of Carousels the name of your beloved (even though you haven’t told even your best friend) is already on the lips of the ticket salesman. In the Land of Carousels five generations may spin on the same carousel since carousels live much longer than people. In the Land of Carousels everyone asks for winter in the summer, and when it’s snowing, they long for the sea. In the Land of Carousels the easiest trade is to turn to another part of the world and fly away for good. In the Land of Carousels the hardest trade is to love: your beloved escapes your sight as the astronaut’s meal in zero gravity. In the Land of Carousels I buy another ticket for another ride. I wait in line hoping you haven’t left the Land of Carousels.

Translated by Kalina Janeva

NEW CONSTELLATIONS 1.

We spent the first part of the night Piecing together new constellations When I saw in the sky a “Sleeping swallow” You hastened to draw the constellation of the “Pillow” When you discerned the constellation of the “Bent Tulip” I gathered a few stars to prop it up The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

90 When I saw the glistening of the “Eel” constellation You told me that the whole sky is one big ocean When you chanced on the constellation of the “101 Pearls” I whispered: the galaxies are like oysters Whenever we saw new flocks of stars We rushed to find them heavenly trees so they can rest 2.

And when we finally found homes For all the stars, comets, meteors and constellations We decided we can take our deserved leave And rest for the remainder of the night 3.

Next morning began as any other morning: we looked at each other, As if we knew not of any new constellations

THE LAKE EXPANDS

This is no ordinary ebb and flow; while some lakes recede from geography and flow into history, one lake expands daily.

It expands a foot in height and width, even more in depth.

The divers have given up on all attempts to reach its bottom, fearing they’ll get to the center, or even to the other side of earth.

Archeologists have started to boast that they are sure to find there the first home of the first people.

Yet, further than the deep, expands The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

91 the endless silence and the endless blue;

all the things spilled in there, never stop it from being even more blue, more clear, more transparent every new morning.

The blue of the lake expands together with the blue of the frescoes and the skies. It expands together with the silence.

No matter how loud, noisy or blaring we are in the night, the lake gets even more quieter and calmer each morning. The waves have become silent, quieter than the beating of a sleeping heart. The silence is expanding to the other side of earth.

Translated by Milan Damjanoski Vladimir Martinovski (1974) is poet, prose writer, essay writer, literary critic and translator. He works as an Associate professor, teaching the subject of Comparative Poetics at the Department of General and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philology “Blazhe Koneski”, Sts Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. He completed his PhD at University Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle at 2007. He was the President of the Association of Comparative Literature of Macedonia (2009-2013). He is member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Semiotic Studies.

Furthermore, he is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association and a member of the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies. He is Secretary of the Macedonian PEN Centre. He authored 7 poetry books:Sea Moon (2003), Hidden Poems (2005), And Water and Earth and Fire and Air (2006), Quartets (2010), Hurry up and Wait!

(2011), Before and after the Dance (2012) and Real Water (poetry, 2014), as well as 7 books of literary studies and essays. Vladimir Martinovski is recipient of the following literary awards: First Prize at the Short Story Competition of “Nova Makedonija” (2009), Brother’s Miladinovci Award (awarded by the International Festival Struga Poetry Evenings, 2010), Dimitar Mitrev Award for literary criticism (awarded by the Macedonian Writers Association, 2013) and Knight of the written word Prize (2014).

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Translators Translators are as equally important as the original authors. I wanted to place here the details of all the translators of the Macedonian poets but could not. I was provided only with a few - K P

Graham W. Reid (1938-2015), M.A., M.B.E. born Edinburgh.

Read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Taught English for twenty-five years at Ss. Cyril & Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia. Widely translated both poetry and prose from Macedonian into English. M.A. thesis at Bradford University on Reflections of Rural-Urban Migration in Contemporary Macedonian Poetry.

Peggy Reid (1939-2015), M.A. (Cantab), Doctor honoris causa, Skopje, M.B.E., born Bath, U.K., taught English at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia, for twenty years between 1969 and 2006. Translator/co-translator from Macedonian of novels, poetry, plays and works of nonfiction.

Magdalena Horvat (born 1978, Skopje, Macedonia) is the

author of two poetry collections: This is it, your (2006) and Bluish and other poems (2010). Among the books she has translated into Macedonian are Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Fiona Sampson’s The Distance Between Us. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia.

Adam Reed (born 1978, Athens, Georgia, US) has co-translated/

edited several poetry collections, anthologies and works of nonfiction from Macedonian into English. He taught English, Writing and History courses at University American College Skopje, Macedonia, for several years. He currently lives in Athens, Georgia.

Sudeep Sen He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the

editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to speak and read at the Nobel Laureate Week. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages

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FICTION OLIVERA KJORVEZIROSKA

The Death of the Cook

A was a cook. Although his profession solely relied on a cane of numbers and letters, and his free time rolled on his feelings, what really moved him as a unique human taste of the world… was the cooking. Since he was a child, A had fantasized to open a restaurant and as his fantasy became more distant in the course of the years, the taste of his meals became more and more irresistible; even magical. A’s real life slowly roasted in the middle oven rack: on top was his profession and at the bottom, his feelings. On top there were the letters and numbers and at the bottom the pain.

Since from younger days, A would stuff the most of those that he loved the most. As his mother kneaded – he watched, and when he would stay alone – he did what she had missed to do. For example, he would knead the bread longer and more energetically, because his mother did not always do this and then she wondered why the bread would sometimes break when baking and sometimes not. He would set the clock for the bread to rise for the first time, and for the second time, before baking it; at a precise temperature, of course and to a precise degree. Once he had put cumin in the fried leek for the pie and since then his house started to smell like otherThe Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

94 ness and somehow seductively and sexually, movingly desirably, he moved out of his family kitchen. A was not born for the kitchen he grew up in, because there hunger was seen only as an empty pan that should be filled in with anything… He considered hunger as yearning; for him, of course. Yearning that had to be responded, compensated with dignity, in a multiple way. With passion.

For his first love, who, by the way, was younger than him and insatiable, he prepared two breakfasts, once in bed, and the second one on the kitchen counter, lunch at the dinner table, dinner at the coffee table by the TV set in the living room and two snacks… anyplace around the apartment… on the bed, on the floor… A cooked and cooked almost day and night, banana halves fried on butter and most common old fashioned dips with dry red peppers scalded with hot oil. There was nothing that A cooked that should not eat up. The food… and himself. One year after another, one pan after another, powdered sugar and vanilla flowers with orange taste placed in a bowl nest to diverse home make cookies, doughnuts and small doughnuts skewers coated with dark chocolate with more than 70% of cocoa, Greek moussakas, Dalmatian potatoes with Swiss chard, lahmacunes and falafels, red lentil soups with coriander and garlic, pumpkin soups with curcuma, saffron and finely chopped red peppers, or whatever green in the world and… his love started to grow and bloat, and nothing would fit it anymore.

Pregnant from greed and insatiate, she could only give birth to more new recipes, combinations, coatings… Never anything else…

Unlike the beginning of her marriage with A, her pants would not fit anymore, then the shirts, the shoes… then the dining table would not fit, the sofa in the living room, and most scary thing was when their double bed could not fit and it pressured her and suffocated her so she could not bear. Still, he felt that it could somehow be solved with food and it had no significant influence on her. But when their whole house became too small for her, first love burst, gushed out and flew out of their home as a plumbing accident.

Only his soul lifted up from this disaster, just as wooden floor lifts from too much humidity.

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95 A‘s second love, his peer, finished with a similar lifting of his

wooden floor soul. She did not get fat, but she vomited at each one of his master pieces. His menu was different, pasta with homemade sauce, garlic fried in olive oil, fresh basil from the terrace or homemade pesto with walnuts instead of pine nuts, a piece of Parmesan that has to be grated immediately before eating, thin breadsticks of dark flour type 900 with seeds and mint added in the dough, an invented Cesar salad with yellow cheese cut in sticks, small loaves filled with anything, Spanish pie with vegetables and corn flour, Gipsy pie with puff pastry… What was common for all these meals this time was the strange, proportional law: the tastier they were – the more she vomited. At one point she grew so weak that A started to prepare a lava cake for two with a single egg. And then ... – not even that! His second love simply disappeared in air like a strong smell of fried fish in the kitchen driven away by the exhaust fan.

Years later, a certain B fell in love with A She was older than him, but he did not deserve either her ex-youth or her current age. He did not deserve her and he could not stand such a giant love in his big and long, and yet somehow fragile hands with two wedding rings: one on the ring finger on his right hand – a thick one, too thick, made of yellow gold; and the second one on the ring finger of left hand – a thin one, too thin, made of white gold. ‘It would be great for me as well if I knew about love, at least as much as I know cooking’, A thought. ‘If I could perfectly peel my emotions rather than vegetables… If I loved when I was loved… It would be great if I loved B, but I don’t.’ The relationship lasted, B‘s fire warmed A. The autumn passed, the winter came and A was soon tucked in and dozed in B’s warmth as a sneaky, spoiled pet. When he came to his senses, after his mind was blurred by the enjoyment of her love, as if he had deserved it, he was supposed to think about the third wedding ring, for which he really did not even have a free finger. But there was nothing to think and contemplate about; B did not mean anything to him! He simply – was not with her. And why shouldn’t he leave her when during the time they were together?

He did not make her even a cup of coffee; did not fry any eggs; did The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

96 not warm up anything for her in the microwave; did not even make a piece of bread with meat spread, ajvar, margarine… When B asked him once whether he knew how to cook, he decisively said ‘No!’ not even wishing to reply with the usual, polite and routine counterquestion ‘How about you?’ It was this that got to him very soon.

B was not the type of a woman who falls in love often and short. Hurt and broken like a match in a wrong pocket, she could not give him up yet. She started to pretend that she was a friend to him, only to have him by her side one way or the other. At times she put her dignity in front of his feet like a mat. She cried like a little girl three times, in front of him… and he noticed only once and then he did not care, of course. Soon, B started to invite him to lunches and dinners and A, just like any other man, not as an expert cook, sunk into her shallow kitchen. He was fascinated by the taste of her meals… Once, eating a surreal pork steak with butter and parcel, he said that she was paying too much attention to hunger, and she replied: ‘Hunger is a yearning which has to be responded, compensated with dignity and in a multiple way, with passion…’

The next time she put cumin in the fried leek for the pie, and then A, somehow seductively and sexually, movingly desirably, moved out into her family kitchen. She started to fry bananas in butter for him; she poured voluptuous chocolate mousse in the varicella scars on his forehead and she licked it with passion. She made doughnuts and small doughnuts, skewers, Greek moussakas, Dalmatian potatoes with Swiss chard, lahmacunes and falafels, red lentil soups with coriander and garlic, pumpkin soups with curcuma, saffron and finely chopped red peppers, pasta with homemade sauce, garlic fried in olive oil, basil and Parmesan, thin breadsticks with seeds and mint, Spanish pie, Gipsy pie… and A neither gained nor lost weight; he just nibbled and nibbled her love, seating his indifference in the most beautiful and only armchair in B’s life.

On the New Year ’s Eve, B made cabbage rolls, Russian salad, buns, Vasina cake, baklava… and plain chicken soup with homemade noodles for the first new morning. As lampions twinkled on the Christmas tree, the little lights rhythmically went on The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016

97 and off, and piercing shots of firecrackers were heard from outside, B asked her sinful lover what he wanted to eat.

‘The soup’– he told her, not looking at her. – ‘Then, we’ll see’.

‘Here you are’, - she told him in a voice that hugged and kissed, bringing him a dish of hot soup which he cruelly moved away from himself to be cooled. His gesture burned her soul. Later, much too later, when the soup was cold, A ate it without any attention. He slurped it like an animal, as if hunger and love were empty pans that were to be filled in with anything.

It was the last soup of his life. Everything that is hot is love; everything that has forcefully been cooled is hate. One of them heals – the other one poisons. A poisoned himself because she was the only one he did not cook for, and she loved him the most; because he had placed her on the wrong rack in his life’s oven.

Translated by Elizabeta Bakovska

Olivera Kjorveziroska

FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY Published by Vel.Kathiravan, K G E TEAM, Chennai, India - 600024 Printed by Print Process, Chennai- 600014 / Phone: +949176991885 The Wagon Magazine - November 15 - 2016