Poetry by Milan Dežinský, Kamil Bouška, Olga Pek, Wanda Heinrichová, Jan Balabán, Pavel Šrut, Stepan Nosek, Šťepán Nosek, Irena Šťastná, Ivan Wernisch, Jiří Kolař, Ondřej Buddeus, Magdalena Platzová, Petr Hruška, Tereza Riedlbauchová, Jonáš Hájek, and Marie Šťastná.
AGAIN IN SUMMER I will love again in summer once foxes with bound feet don’t have fur covered in frost or frozen noses
TRANSITIONS 1984 to: I am a man of borders. A city divided by two states. What can and can’t be seen. A hooker
[Landscape of the oppressive past…] Landscape of the oppressive past children lost in it and silence examine the shape of a leaf the
The Ukrainian woman slept curled up
like someone / who knows how to conserve space, warmth, / maybe even a dream.
IVA She was pathetic. I was so much more sophisticated. I couldn’t help sneering at her. I said: “My God, to be with
[No…] No No we No we shouldn’t No we shouldn’t perceive No we shouldn’t perceive the Ukrainian No we shouldn’t perceive the Ukrainian
Poems from Instruction Manual NAME Sit down at the table and clear your mind Take a pen and write your beloved’s first
AS THE SNOW MELTED They appeared as the snow melted Those who had perished in the last days of March, Then those from
[He leaves those cows of his…] He leaves those cows of his up to their knees in it. Heads worn raw at the
he leans out the classroom’s only window
and sees clearly that one of the school’s scuffed canoeshas broken loose from the riverbank
and with the formation of rocking ducks suddenly minglesan arabesque of bright arms and an almost human laughter.
SISYPHUS´S WIFE for Jan and Boženka Skácel He was close to tears as if he had known the penalty the day before
CEDAR AND HAMMER “Who’s going for a smoke?” a nurse called down the corridor of the psychiatric ward. Of all the patients aimlessly
NORTH STATION the steppe flows into cold seas the rail embankment ramshackle raft in August clumps of dry grass wave at outings bound
When I regained my faith in poetry, I started writing prose. Concept was my totemic operator. I amassed trophies of species on the brink of extinction and smuggled rare genera across borders to inlay my texts with them.
DRAFT The wind outside made the street sing: how strangely the human voice sounds there now, as if mutating, as if the body’s
At the opposite bank a barge rolls the river under itself. / We are not approaching our end, / but from ultimate emptiness / the end is hurtling towards us.
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