serbian

fog pouring from my mouth

Four poems by Milena Marković, translated from Serbian by Steven and Maja Teref

half-built with syllables

A poem by Ignacio Elizalde Johnson, translated from Spanish by Thania Muñoz D.

what ancestral mercy

A poem by Pura López-Colomé, translated from Spanish by Jason Stumpf

Pursued between the cracks of countries

From Copy by Dolores Dorantes, translated by Robin Myers.

and gone are the seasons/ dormant under smoke

And how we violated the calm

penned in by a semi-sick swaying

The greater part of death comes over me

After death you will scratch at infinity

pounds of flesh, bile, phlegm, spit, dust

with the city we have enough of nostalgia

Dragon (Drache) by Anselm Kiefer

the urban tedium of the coast

They were a horse perhaps

And we wolfed down the rocks they put on the table.

walled up between the hours

and after sessions luxurious and tender

Should we stop to breathe as we open a parenthesis in the dream

Thirst, its golden circumstances

that which flies, flaps, beats

Underneath all of this there’s a song

a pilot dodging wood and granite crosses

to measure the body or to neglect it

Outside: The entire dead ocean, emptying itself

Your breath bright with presence is origin.

A wild tiger’s excesses. Or an ocelot.

the color of time on a ruined wall

a failed defense against our common fate

On the table, to the side of the door, is my heart

They don’t alliterate October with gold falling from the fragile trees

There is a lawless canyon in our lips, a labyrinth whose exits are burning.

Long ago I found out that you were an unfinished animal

I opened an ossuary and saw the bones

blessed by vagabond hands with a box of wine

three barricades three barricades and one dark night