Photo by Yana Lozava
Paper Swallows
I write letters and send them down the river.
Once the water dries up, I walk down the bed.
When I come up onto the shore,
I stand in the sun for a while, becoming bread.
My letters, if they do arrive,
don’t say anything to anybody.
They wish for open windows
where they can turn into swallows.
Every Good Thought Comes True
The child I couldn’t parent
has many names. Sometimes
when I talk about the past
he listens carefully, unborn.
We watch as snails scale
onion stalks, and the future
belongs to us. We wait
at stoplights, paint doors
that open onto everywhere.
Passing through them,
I become him, and a woman
gives birth to him, just as
I imagined him, because
every good thought comes true.
Every name searches
for a way to be spoken.
NikolaSevdaRadeyaTashkoYoana,
do you hear that?
Someone is calling you
back from the sandbox of stars.
Above
The trees speak a cosmic language
with trunks, leaves, and branches, bees and ants.
Peeling bark assumes the form of angels and Eastern women.
If we learn to be silent, we’ll be able to hear them,
and if we keep quiet a little longer, we’ll probably find
that all our words are ignorant.
Cherry Whitsuntide
It’s you and me the ants will honor
come Saturday, hoisting cherry pits
up onto their backs in a procession.
The world is wide, and short on time,
and still trying to catch up to the box turtle…
But till then, I’ll take detours for dewy flowers,
chitchat with the grandma who sells them,
and since the graveyard of my blood is far away
I’ll go looking for a headstone with its name erased.
Tiresias in Madrid
If you live long enough, you can’t help but turn into a prophet
like that Russian tourist on the Madrid metro.
If he were wearing an ancient robe under that white beard, nobody would doubt
that it’s really him, Tiresias, who reads the past to tell the future.
I’ve lived so long that now I’m a prophet, he says
to my gaze, to its glint of disagreement.
If you live long enough,
you’ll also understand
that what’s visible isn’t all there is.
To see everything, you need
to step back, the way you look at a picture,
squint your eyes,
or go blind.
In the end
it seems death is the masterpiece
we wait our whole lives to see:
that prediction
no horoscope can reveal.
YANITSA RADEVA (1977) made her debut with the poetry book Other Rhythms (2003). In 2011, she published her first novel, The Bonbonnière, based on a true story, which was noted with a young author’s diploma from the Ministry of Culture. Her second poetry book, The Hive of Words (2012), was nominated for the Nikolay Kanchev national poetry award. In the following years, she published the novels The Season of Yoana (2015), The Road to Thebes (2017), and Hades Sends His Regards (2020). Yanitsa Radeva’s writings have been published prolifically in the foreign literary press, including the Croatian magazine Poezija (2009, 2024), the New York-based Absinthe magazine (2012), and the Iranian collection Post Soviet (2020). Her works have been translated into English, Korean, Macedonian, Romanian, Croatian, and Farsi. In 2024 four of her poems were published in Exchanges, The University of Iowa’s Journal of Literary Translation.
About the Translator:
DREW ROLLINS is a writer and translator who grew up in Maryland and Bulgaria. He enjoys playing basketball, guitar, and little tricks. A recipient of the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, he recently earned an MFA in Poetry from Boston University.