
Anna Belkovska
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
Poetry by Inga Pizāne, Semyon Khanin, Anna Belkovska. Fiction by Jānis Joņevs. Translated by Jayde Will, Kaija Straumanis, Kevin M. F. Platt, Anton Tenser, Sasha Spektor, and Daniil Cherkassky.
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat
How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.
You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat
How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.
You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.
Lil’ B is the perfect example of a highly functioning retard. I’m mad he fucked my grandma, dumped her in a forest and then stole her jewelry. He’s making his bread and butter off coonery. Let that boy grandma cook.
We’d be down in the port at the Hesperia café, 8:30 in the morning. Talking about whatever. She’d be chain-smoking, and I would shred the skin of my lips with my teeth. Those nervous habits were all we had left in those days …
I don’t want to put him on the spot / and I know I’d think less of him / if he gave the wrong answer. Instead, / I name names in my head, a long list / of friends who would have let me die.
I went out to my mailbox. / Everything was addressed to a previous / occupant (twice removed) / who is now, / according to my neighbors / deceased.
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat
You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.
True darkness is in a child’s bedroom. Deep black. Elsewhere there’s just a meager, watery twilight, in which everything, in the end, acquires a humiliating distinctness.
The autocrat draws a large crowd for his speech. He begins to speak but no words come out.
How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.
My body is a shallow mound, is how her most famous poem began. She had written it when she was the same age as the young man who was sitting opposite her now, wanting to interview her.
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The teacher swung his arm to strike her once more, but it remained in mid-air, as if petrified. A blue children’s watch was engraved on his skin. And with every tick the clasp sank deeper into his flesh. They could not get it off without cutting.
It contained the body of a roughly four-year-old boy. That in itself is astounding, since we’re talking about a time frame of about twenty-four thousand years ago …
Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.
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