SOFIJA POPOVSKA
Trans. from Macedonian by Sofija Popovska
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
Eyes are difficult because they're teeth;
Sometimes rich and gleaming, gliding through a gilded feast,
Wrapped in violent red velvet, and luxurious dead ends;
(But I love the) murky, melancholic, playing matted music, looking over barren fields --
Fields are difficult because they're hands
Knots and rivers laying over eyes.
Blue smell of rain and dirt -- veins smell like the skies split open, like the road behind slipping into the past.
Fingertips smell like a promise --
Ten thousand graves sigh at once;
A bruise is a promised haunting.
"Come, just this once," I ask, disingenuously. I mean "a thousand times".
Bruises disappear into the past and a promise draws near.
An open grave plays the memory of rain when handled gently. The earth smells like fingertips on eyelids -- a homeland rough and transient.
Heathens love the rain like I love the shadow of your eyelashes over freckles and undiscovered celestial bodies.
The sky splits open and veins cascade down nostalgically.
The road behind disappears into bruised earth, into ten thousand graves. I come to you, bringing a memory of rain.
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Final Destination Hotel
The lights dim in consecutive sections, stirring darkness into the absinthe fog of the hallway.
A hallway of sin-red doors, lacquered, broadcasting voices inaudible like polyester static.
I stand pressed against the wall as an acid phantom closes a black rubber glove hand around my neck.
Fuse.
Fuses pop in my head and there's flying sparks and rapid eye movement, there's round saw blades spinning into each other like rams locked in a fight to the death.
A man walks by and his empty eye sockets fill when blue eyes flash into existence like lightning; he begins to laugh.
A door opens and welcomes him in - black sugar death, and closes with an understated finality.
Two lovers lock in a kiss and their skin undulates; they fall apart and spill to the floor, thousands of glass beads, resurrect as dew drops on an apricot bloom.
A Japanese poet looks at them and his forehead constricts into ritual madness, incense lullaby.
He writes a silent scream with lines lithe like riverside reeds.
My eyelids and lashes become venus flytraps and consume words I can't read, digest them with honey tears.
I unzip and remove my skin, fold it carefully, smoothing the creases; my soul stands - obsidian longing and youthful goosebumps - in the frail wildrose dawn, shivering like a funambulist walking an umbilical cord stretched above wuthering heights.
The phantom comes at me boundless and sublime like a roaring sandstorm,
Vulnerable bloodlust, catatonic tongue tension.
Conjoined we condense, then sublimate into an impossible shockwave, synapse explosion, terrorist love.
"Hope you'll miss me," I say, relishing the fleeting flavor of flesh-bound vainglory,
And finally forget my name.
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The Meat Manifesto
Just as the day comes off the boil
And the sky begins to undulate, farewell-red,
A bronze colossus bursts through the window
And offers to make me bluer eyes
"If you can wait until the Morning Star falls unto Earth".
"No thanks," I say with a thousand teasing playground voices, "I prefer my cataracts."
But it's not enough, and I turn my flesh to green, to gray while he watches with tortured disappointment.
The Final Blow - I open my chest like an old flasher with a chewed up gum smile and there's a crumpled up plastic bag in the designated heart-space.
He is struck with a brittle lonely sadness like Ozymandias' feet.
I leave as he crumbles until there's nothing but a tin-soldier heart.
Outside, I profess my love to the post-Midday-Madhouse leftover loiterers.
The angels shear Judas in Heaven and his auburn locks fall like ashes from the burning sky,
A woman grieves over an egg carton convinced it's her womb,
Two adolescents with fetal freedom try to 69 in a bathtub full of piss but never quite succeed,
A bad poet attempts to drink hemlock from a red party cup but anxiety rattles his hands and he spills it.
Tepid boos and nasal exhales from the disappointed crowd.
Two friends ceremoniously discuss which one should hang the other but eat an old man instead.
"This is fine," he says with lavender moth-repellent serenity, "this isn't the worst storm."
A man in a faded flannel shirt cries because he is too stale to be set on fire,
Gets decapitated by his therapist in a Mantis Mating session.
"I love you," I say to the multitudes of meat that surround me,
Green meat, pink sausage filling, all caught in neurotic peristalsis.
I lie down, marooned on an island of fearfully writhing flesh, and make snow angels and ugly abstract art.
Light years above, God's wind blows clouds of cherry blossom into the blazing, mother-crimson sun, and they explode into spirit music, freedom like Big Love, the bluest eye of all.
I meet the sun's gaze with insolent rodent impertinence, mealworm pride, as the flesh around me becomes fauvist fucking, cubical screams.
"Don't you wish you could stop looking?"
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An Opulent Room
A lacquered gleam denies the gilded violence of a feast; camellia petal beauty and sealed lips.
Warm blood magic bristles with sugared silver, savory iron, and a moment of salivation.
What if death is sweet and womb-warm at the entrance? A revolution takes place aromatically behind closed doors.
Red plush and a cheap frankincense sultriness; misty quartz eyes of a doe-legged nude.
In another room a record sighs and bones break with an insect-wing-flutter and a dropping curtain.
"Quizás, quizás, quizás..."
––––
Cicada Shell
Somewhere summer nears its evening,
A cicada sheds its shell, the air is wistful with thyme and dew.
A piece of rust flutters on the train tracks -- trapped butterfly wing.
A breeze swells and exhales mown grass and asphalt fumes, a train whistle misses me by a whisker, I taste blood.
A beast nurses a flesh wound among pollen and opal soundwaves,
Meadow amnesia sifting from the fizzy green shade like dandelion seeds.
Can you still see me? I drift past red brick buildings and periwinkle-dotted grass, past road signs submerged in a grungy siesta among wax-calm foliage, past tidal trajectories of passers-by.
The cicada sheds its shell and it rusts the lush late-summer grass, possessed by a tepid phantom of love-songs rising to a bygone moon.
Terrorism is a type of nostalgia and summer emits a smell of burning chitin and salivating, future-bound eyes.
I'm leaving soon for somewhere else.
––––
Sofija Popovska is a poet and translator currently based in Germany. She writes for Asymptote Journal, and some of her translations have been featured in Circumference Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Faces in the Crowd, was published in 2021 by Dijalog Press. Her latest poetry collection, Thaumatropes, which she co-authored with Jonah Howell, was published in July 2023 by Newcomer Press.