Alenka Jovanovski: Poems (2012)

ALENKA JOVANOVSKI

To My Friends From everyone I loved I took something, irrevocably, made it mine.

From the first, a skeptical eyebrow, raised like a shield.

From the second, a refusal to eat the living (though I ate many accidentally).

They cooled me, warmed me.

What did I take from you, what did I give you? Tarpaulin covers the ground, blinding hundreds of rooting eyes.

The giving tree. The Fiesta sheltered us for a night, and in the morning we saw (like people buried alive) droplets on the windshield. In the smash up I destroyed it, its blues dissolved, but look at it now: the gaps eaten by rust become new roosts.

Some day, before we part, I’ll learn to carry out a mother's chores: I’ll talk to the plants, soften the laundered fabric, bake cakes be fine.

That future scares me; I don't like to practice little things take their time and raise you to the ground.

Finally, from you dear Lamp (I kept running away from this refuge): from you I take grace and flame that burns clear of the ashes, is steadfast and pierces the deepest breath. © Alenka Jovanovski © for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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Were they fair, our exchanges, were you given bronze for your gold arms, sounding brass, were you still hungry?

Have we dissolved, tangled like seaweed, are we fused?

Do my cells belong to you forever?

Is the water every day infused with more milk?

With whose foot did we push off into this ocean?

And with whose arm will we swim out?

Translated by Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

Š Alenka Jovanovski Š for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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Mother's Tongue As a child, my mother didn't speak the language of her mother, but the language of those that had killed her.

She even laughed, hoped and mourned in the languge of killers.

They would break in during the night, black bearded and sharp knived would take the house for themselves.

My mother never utters completely last things, she is afraid to talk about that.

Even my trousers, this passing thing, were tailored by her in the language, [that was] measured upon somebody else (that's why my trousers are seemingly infinite: in truth they are always too tight, too long, a wrong style).

I, her daughter, thus swallow foreign languages, wash my bread abroad and bake foreigners' clothes.

To be clean and sated I have to be hungry and naked.

To be naked and naked I have to find myself against the wall, crash against the infinite fact of concrete.

The poisoned language thus spreads its quiet and hidden life: I nourish it through breadcrumbs, I taste it through broken threads, I chew holes in the fabric, this tenacious, rough dimension, this living mixture of water and dust – I know it when the other and mine are thoroughly mixed-up, when I don't know who am I if [I is to be] who at all – because we are all related by blood, so lonely, without boundaries against that which breaks through the door © Alenka Jovanovski © for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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and enters the language – and who, if who at all, should strip him from (and how should she strip him) of knives and traces of horror?

The mother, that no longer is, then opens her tongue.

(She) Licks blood and mucus and excrements of her offspring; makes heart septums get thinner and peptic ulcers get healed, walls she melts and doors and windows.

A rough muscle wakes them up gently: The ones that keep sobbing and the ones that are walled-up in the sleep from whithin.

Translated by Alenka Jovanovski

© Alenka Jovanovski © for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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A Post-card from Ljubljana to Serbian Poetry For Ana Ristović i wait for your poetry postcard, you said. i cannot help myself: standing still again. days are long as letters, and deleted, there is fear of verbs, then something in the poem comes to close. mercator earlier, post-office next, automatical, irrevocable as a mechanical eyelid. don't read old dailies, don't send wine and flowers, greetings to ex-flats, don't be blind in doings, made in china, what is made-up betrays. leave the house of past behind, without locking, it won't be stolen from you, and do look ahead: your knees, injured in the childhood, are stitched and smiling; the river in the evening sun is infinite and alive, there aren't any scabs. and the light and bang, with that it all begins; the fear after 35 of age, for those who dwell in walls, a journey from štepanjsko to fužine, the fact that now i feed ducklings and the sky. hard bread is all i have, blue quietness in brest, literary-capitalist directions: next to none. tempests of resentful homeland are covert and stand at the beginning; in the end there is p.s.: to step forward, deeper, into what is empty – into everything that will provoke them.

Translated by Alenka Jovanovski © Alenka Jovanovski © for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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A Poem for Violeta Parra Y el canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto.

Y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto.

(Violeta Parra) No intimate poem can yet be written.

Only a poem about inner organs of a cat run-over [by car], when blood oozes out of the furred little sack, toghether with kidneys and heart in the fatty layer.

The poem whose skin is more white and injured than the skin of the back, with its cancer tissue removed.

The poem that pulls swallowed words out of the wound, words with blunt edge, and opens them up, so they might breathe.

A poem that is like an encounter of people that walk at the edge of the night, knowing that fear runs away into a blow, if you push it away, and becomes love, if you take it apart.

This here is a real matter of choice, no subconscious can excuse it, can lead it.

My innermost poem lives among people, my innermost poem melts chains.

Sometimes I want to forget it, sometimes I want to run over it, but it's impossible to forget it, it's impossible to run over it.

No bird, no air, no landscape: I am nothing of these – I travel organically, through veins, and fervently bond oxygen, to embrace everything that can tear us apart. © Alenka Jovanovski © for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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Translated by Alenka Jovanovski

Š Alenka Jovanovski Š for translation Alenka Jovanovski & Andrea Brady

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