Growing old
I want us to go to the beach year after year,
and be young, and collect pebbles.
I want us to be broke, be flush with cash.
feel wiped out, never get run over,
have children and pastures, and horses they can run with
but never fall from, and the smell of wild herbs,
and things are not fucked up for whatever reason,
and it is quiet, and warm in the winter.
I want us to watch all the movies,
rewatch the ones we think matter,
share some with our friends,
tell each other our secrets and get enough sleep
before we drift off for good
embracing, maybe, it doesn’t matter,
as long as we’re close, close together in time,
so we don’t end up absolutely destroyed
when we can no longer tell anyone
that the lunch they cooked was delicious
and the hand we once took and held
has let go forever.
I propose
we stop talking,
it’s become pointless.
we stopped allowing ourselves the truth
a long time ago.
we’ve replaced it with a comfortable couch
and screens full of nonsense,
most of them saying,
not like this, or, oh you’ll see.
we are guilty before we’ve even had a thought
forever, because we wrote
that what’s black is black,
and I am not talking about black people,
that fatness is fat
and unhealthy.
that we have no one to talk to,
but plenty to fight with.
in fact, it’s all we want.
the favorite pastime of an entire generation
is to withdraw into themselves
pull the covers over their heads
and tell all those people
whom they don’t know, can’t stand,
but are friends with online,
that this is not right.
the moral is go fuck yourself.
and find things to love.
STEFAN IKOGA is a multidisciplinary author who writes across poetry, prose, screenwriting, and advertising. He is the author of the poetry collections Nepukistika (Dontcareaboutics 2018) and Navednaj (At Once 2025). A winner of the Sofia: Poetics literary festival, Ikoga has received screenwriting awards at the Sofia Independent Film Festival and a Cinelibri award for an animated film based on one of his poems.
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.