Dust
I come out
of the cathedral with dirty hands.
I touched all the marble
to see if it
was real or painted
on the white wall to seem like it.
what’s it like
to want to be Michelangelo
but they only set you
to paint imitations of marble
because marble costs
much more than work?
and yet the work peels
and falls in dirty strips
falls to the floor – the only
real marble
in the cathedral.
and turns to dust.
I come out
of the church of purgatory
with dirty hands.
there only the eight mummies
look clean, stationed behind
the windows, as in a shop
where people buy belief
that death comes to everyone,
even the monks. and from the floor
skulls grin at me, blackened
by shoes superstitiously spreading
dust over the earth.
dust to dust.
I come out
of the church of the angels
with dirty hands, in fact,
it’s dirtier than any church
in the city and the most exquisite
and the dust is not on the floor, but dances
in a ray of light hardly making it through
a dirty window in the shape
of a withered lotus, dust from angels
without heads and hands, dust from cherubs
broken off their heaven and smashed
into eight billion pieces
of the same marble;
for all of us there’s an invisible
piece of an angel – to sneak
up our noses and make us sneeze, and for us
to naively make excuses
about hay fever in September.
this is what we have in common with angels
and mummies.
in the end everyone ends up
on someone else’s
dirty hands.
ANASTASIYA STOEVA is а poet, critic, illustrator and designer based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is a two-time winner of the National Literary Competition “Petya Dubarova” and her debut poetry book, “Uncommitted Crimes” (Scribens, 2024), won the “Damyan Damyanov” national award for best first collection. Her works have appeared in Ninth Letter, Interpret, Cineuropa, Zippy Frames, Eye for Film and others.
About the Translator:
TOM PHILLIPS is a UK-born poet, translator and lecturer currently living in Bulgaria, where he teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His translations ranges across a broad spectrum, from contemporary poetry and fiction to academic studies, oral history testimony and the biography of Bulgarian footballer Hristo Stoichkov. Forthcoming publications include full-length collections of his translations of the Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev and of contemporary Bulgarian poet Kristin Dimitrova.