Definitions I Didn’t Know When I Began Drawing
A monster is never something from the future
despite the lingering fear you might become one.
Skin thickening is when you stop shaking at night.
My aunt is an alcoholic but I still think instability is not inherent.
We looked at August Neter’s Meine Augen zur Zeit der Erscheinungen
because it’s considered “outsider art”
but what makes the eyes of a person normal?
In eighth grade, we had to draw something we were afraid of and I drew
my father.
Twenty years later I drew the same but better.
‘Describe yourself as a beautiful person’ is where I left the canvas blank.
Shedding of the carcass means vanishing in thin air.
Drawing a monster means drawing a room with no windows.
It means breathing out my childhood.
My Mother Was a Crow but She Never Learned
how to fly. Instead, she had to tread the ground of
cats and wheels.
My mother’s beak never grew harder and she starved
herself to death.
She never made a sound
no croaking to split the air, no flapping of wings.
Seeing a crow doesn’t have to mean anything –
black wings are sometimes just that.
We attach ourselves to meanings when desperate for a purpose.
My mother never showed me her nest so I can’t blame her for never teaching me how to build one.
Yours, A Human Body
Blueberries are smudged over my mouth
and I’ve bitten the column that shapes your spine.
It was never enough to only imagine you –
a bruised universe between my lips.
God is a reflection of what we are
and I lick my way to your belly
my spit blossoming on your skin.
Don’t tell anyone but I’ve tasted you
long before you remembered my name.
It was never enough to tie you in velvet
like any other hostage
of a mind that’s a concrete building collapsing to dust.
I eat my way inside you and feеd on the unwhispered
until my stomach hurts.
I keep you on a blackened wall covered in mold
chlorine sky amid a nuclear winter.
It was never enough to abandon you there.
It was never enough to crown you.
The Black Box
I’m locked in an old webcam
that keeps images of the time we went to Rome
and stayed in a small apartment, not far from the Coliseum.
It smells of salt, wind with sand
and the strawberries we covered in honey for breakfast.
It looks like birthdays with your grandparents
the small house they have in the mountains.
It never rains here so my hair is always dry
and the idea of taking a shower doesn’t terrify me.
It’s also never too warm so I don’t have to change.
Nothing changes here –
I am locked in an old webcam that’s a black box I can’t open
my body is on the other side of the page where you scribbled
your plans for the week and how
my depression’s constant self-obsession makes you sick.
I make myself sick
and I can’t see what’s outside.
Because I am locked in an old webcam that’s just a black box I can’t open
and I no longer want to.
EVGENIYA DINEVA is a poet from Bulgaria. Her works appear in Oxford Poetry Library, The Hong Kong Review, Ethel, Asian Cha and others. Her debut poetry collection Animals Have No Fathers was shortlisted for the “Peroto” literary prize. Evgeniya is a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing and a recipient of the 2025 Traduki Residency Grant.
Read more by Evgeniya Dineva
Fiction in Ilanot Review
Poems at the Origami Poems Project
Fiction in Vagabond