Jasmina Topić

We're calling each other while dreaming with our half open mouths

like fishes on the dry land. And in the replacement for at least room

aquarium, we're offering sparkling fish skin, without any price,

Hoping that we'll sneak away before moon of our glow disappears –

Fish skin will become dead skin; skinned down. Tricky fishes!

Or, this could be pledge – skeleton left from a lived dream.

The warmness of the booked places on the map; They are growing

into hallucination appearances. Promising artificial paradise.

On these light mental drugs we're enjoying, imagining

our bodies like the bodies of elastic fishes, great water, and the unknown...

Then we bath in the sun, and then we are reaching marked spots,

bewaring of cold of to much enjoyment.

009079099 Call the number without one, without beginning.

In the quest for almighty technique. Fly, fly, little fish! –

Here are the manuals how not to choke,

or how to make money on packing. And, there is more!

What to do in case you've got a prize journey.

These spaces do not collide in the sense of the world –

Do not overturn by the art of surviving all in one manual.

We're calling each other while dreaming with our half open mouths

like panic, but also cold-blooded fishes, sobbing toward awakening.

And we stumble in the nearest space hole grown up just like

desired spots on the map. And so on... to the occasional recycle.

all my experiences

go straight into literature

Primož Čučnik

Experiences from the figurative sack

go straight into poetry

Even in boring rain, which is dreadful generally speaking,

one can write –

This small effort aimed at using paper,

warming up your fingers

playing chess or solitaire with boredom,

and with creative pennilessness

instantaneous decisions

presuppose reflection,

rashness, adrenalin (in that order?!)

watching a sporting event

heated-up nationalism stew

pocket-sized publisher

a poem is now a guerrilla fighter

I push the cart, empty, of course

I play a game that could also be animated

by verse

for future youth

there’s singing left in front of the door

an ordeal involving experience

on account of a flat where you won’t be able to move in

because you’re broke

Then you switch off the music

the monotonous rhythm of ambiental chaos

and tiny, tiny, even tinier, like

rice for the poor –

The rain is the only constant experience

that is to become a literary one.

I got lost in the space of a book,

the words of a poem in an unknown language followed me,

warm Mediterranean ethnic music, like joint

stays on islands where joy is always to be renewed.

Two spaces edged by shadows and music

annulled me; they brought me down to the level

of a line not drawn,

at the bottom of a sheet, outside the footnote.

Where belonging was dying out

the passion for writing emerged, for one

of the possible worlds washed out by salt

like a misprint.

And the space of the book changed our facial

form, gave us a purpose. And I was. –

Truly attached to verses, to pictures

the way I was to a shoulder of bygone times,

dreaming of northern seas so lively,

from those letters arranged into verses.

I listened, waiting for gold bugs

to start milling across my skin, trembling. I resided

under polar light, within arm’s reach of the otherness

of another, real life...

But we never lived except when reading, sizing up

that which preceded and followed the writing while your eyes,

tiny nutshells on the line of the imaginary,

were both the sea and insomnia.

Now I slide slowly by the glacier whose names

and purpose I do not recognise.

And as if in a deep, deepest dream under ice floes,

occasional voices call out to me from the light

in which it is no longer possible to reside.

This morning, from dawn till dusk.