God
For M.G.
God this poetry’s made me so horny
it’s made me forget my own existence
and here it is the moon that drives people insane
I told everyone everything
I told you about the slicing open of the man
how lots of life flowed out of him
how he felt sick and wanted
to kiss me in the mouth in the ass
in all possible lifelings
as he called them and then disappeared
my last cup of dark blood dissolved
God your poetry is such a light read
so easy but why do I keep on imagining
piercing through your perfect throat
with a very slim absolutely unbearable knife
and a baby is born from your tiny belly
That baby doesn’t love me doesn’t want me
I know I can be mean to it
On Exarch Joseph St. the fat psychiatrist from behind her wooden desk
worn out from thousands of countless suicides
soothes me by telling me I’m not exactly mad
there were some pills that would cure me
the dead man’s frightened look
is more frightening than his death
it is frightening and you told me to leave
because you were sad and there was no way
I could willingly throw you out of the window
absolutely no way
Courage!
God I can’t believe I’m writing again
while the moon is so bright and doesn’t
speak to me as it did last summer when I
asked it to turn itself off. Am I alive?
There was a report reporting that people
prone to bipolar and other various mental disorders
depression schizophrenia etc.
and whatever borderline conditions
that they often write poetry look for poetry create it
sometimes they read it maniacally or send it around
they copy it or sing it tick-tock with it push it thrust it
throw it forth at your feet
God thank you for creating me and then abandoning me
Translated from the Bulgarian by Rumen Pavlov and edited by Ekaterina Petrova.
BELOSLAVA DIMITROVA (1986) is a Bulgarian poet and journalist. She has published three books of poetry and received three Bulgarian poetry prizes. Her poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Macedonian and Hindi. Beloslava lives in Sofia and works at the Bulgarian National Radio.
About the Translators:
RUMEN PAVLOV (1986) is a Bulgarian translator, poet and musician. His first poetry collection in Bulgarian received a national award for best debut book in 2021. His first translated book of poetry is Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus, published in Bulgaria in June 2025. Rumen is the creator of www.tongues.one, where he publishes foreign language works by Bulgarian poets.
EKATERINA PETROVA is a literary translator from Bulgarian and a bilingual nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has translated novels, short stories, nonfiction texts, poetry, plays, and children’s books by many Bulgarian contemporary authors. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, Reading in Translation, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, is coming with New York Review Books in 2026.