Apocalypse always
You’re eating pizza, tossing crumbs
to the sparrows, which your grandmother said
were going extinct, and you chase away the insolent
pigeons, these winged rats, again according to
your grandmother, which seem to be nowhere near extinction.
They spread disease, they drive away the little souls.
The wicked always inherit the Earth.
You are five, your grandmother a hundred and five,
you have a hundred years left to see with your own eyes
that she is right.
The war
Which recent one exactly?
After the noun in the title
we ought to add the preposition “in”
and an ellipsis.
It would be more proper
given the world.
And look, those books on the shelf
have really turned their backs on us.
And you can sense
that their foreheads are clammy.
KALOYAN IGNATOVSKI (b. 1976, Sofia, Bulgaria) has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Water of the Day, came out in the summer of 2024. He has been nominated for the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award and has won the Slaveikov Poetry Award. His work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Croatian. He has participated in poetry festivals in Tibet and China. He is a freelance literary translator from English and Spanish into Bulgarian, and has translated works by Joseph Brodsky, Lawrence Durrell, Louise Glück, Carol Ann Duffy, Samanta Schweblin, Selva Almada, Nicanor Parra among others. Kaloyan Ignatovski is the co-founder of DA Poetry Publishing, and works full-time as editor at St. Kliment Ohridski University Press in Sofia.
About the Translator:
MARIA P. VASSILEVA is a poet and translator based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Russian Literature from Harvard University. She is the editor and co-translator of Silvia Choleva’s The Unexpected Answer (Da Poetry Publishing, 2025) as well as the editor of Choleva’s Journeys There and Back (trans. Ekaterina Petrova; ICU Press, 2025); she also co-edited Linor Goralik’s Found Life (Columbia University Press, 2017) and translated essays for Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over (Columbia University Press, 2021). Her translations of Bulgarian poetry have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation and Ploughshares.