^{translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison}

for years the war has slept next to me in bed holding me in his sleep  
I have died for at least fifteen hundred nights 
in the morning he makes strong coffee with lots of sugar  
wears cufflinks and likes to strut around in high heels

I share my salt my wine without prejudice and dream with him  
he waves his cigarette holder and turquoise fingers 
drinks from gold glasses eats delicately from silver spoons  
leans on the doorway and leers with his shiny kohled eyes

in the heart of the night he plots and devises his offensive  
I see his ambitious plans and immediately cut off my tongue  
soft voices feed the arsenal inside his body 
he spins language into steely strands in his elegant hands

I plant fragrant jasmine around my throat as a border 
I embroider a cuirass from silver thread around my soft arms  
wild horses gallop across the brown flanks of my back 
I build an emergency hospital in the shadow of my breasts

I have observed the laws of war and foolishly awaited battle  
he wakes me up at the crack of dawn and leads me down to the kitchen  
stands behind me and stabs a heavy meat knife between my ribs  
the poison and the immense victories spread through my torso

he whispers crimson soft in my hair 
‘look, the first snow’ 
we can start counting the victims and the graves

oorlog

de oorlog slaapt al jaren naast me in bed houdt me vast in zijn slaap 
ik ben minstens vijftienhonderd nachten gestorven 
hij zet ’s ochtends vroeg sterke koffie met veel suiker 
draagt manchetknopen en paradeert graag op hoge hakken 

ik deel onbevangen mijn zout wijn en dromen met hem 
hij zwaait met zijn sigarettenhouder en turquoise vingers 
drinkt uit gouden glazen eet delicaat met zilveren lepels 
leunt in de deurpost en loert uit zijn glanzende khol ogen 

in het hart van de nacht beraamt en tekent hij zijn offensief 
ik zie zijn ambitieuze plannen en snijd onmiddellijk m’n tong af 
zachte stemmen mesten het wapenarsenaal in zijn lichaam 
hij spint taal tot stalen strengen in zijn verfijnde handen 

rondom mijn keel plant ik geurende jasmijn als omheining 
ik borduur met zilverdraad een harnas aan mijn zachte armen 
op de bruine flanken van mijn rug galopperen wilde paarden 
in de schaduw van mijn borsten bouw ik een noodhospitaal 

ik heb het oorlogsrecht nageleefd en dwaas gewacht op de strijd 
hij wekt me in alle vroegte en leidt me de trap af naar de keuken 
staat stil achter me en steekt een fors vleesmes tussen mijn ribben 
’t gif en de immense zege verspreiden zich in mijn romp 

hij fluistert karmozijnzacht in mijn haar 
‘kijk de eerste sneeuw’ 
het tellen van de slachtoffers en het graven mag beginnen

That you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose. 
There is a melody born of melody, 
Which melts the world into a sea. 
Toil could never compass it, 
Art its height could never hit,
It came never out of wit,
But a music music-born
Well may Jove and Juno scorn.
Thy beauty, if it lack the fire
Which drives me mad with sweet desire, 
What boots it? what the soldier’s mail
Unless he conquer and prevail?
What all the goods thy pride which lift, 
If thou pine for another’s gift?
Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight;—
When thou lookest in his face,
Thy heart saith, Brother! go thy ways. 
None shall ask thee what thou doest, 
Or care a rush for what thou knowest. 
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden,—
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.
Surely he carries a talisman
Under his tongue;
Broad are his shoulders, and strong, 
And his eye is scornful,
Threatening, and young.
I hold it of little matter,—
Whether your jewel be of pure water,
A rose diamond or a white,—
But whether it dazzle me with light.
I care not how you are drest,
In the coarsest, or in the best,
Nor whether your name is base or brave, 
Nor for the fashion of your behavior,— 
But whether you charm me,
Bid my bread feed, and my fire warm me,
And dress up nature in your favor.
One thing is forever good, 
That one thing is success,— 
Dear to the Eumenides,
And to all the heavenly brood. 
Who bides at home, nor looks abroad,
Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.

^{translated from the Croatian by Nina Bajsić}

You don’t think about poetry then 
or about great deeds 
or about politics 
you don’t defy God.
you are as small as a pea 
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When you’re riddled with shrapnel 
from a mortar grenade 
you don’t think about the effect
you have on women
or about the national anthem. 
you crawl under a rock
as you wait for the pain
to go away.

When the prison door
bangs shut behind your back— 
that’s when you think about freedom.

Kada se lupiš sa sjekirom po nozidok cijepaš drva

onda ne misliš na poeziju
ili na velika djela 
ili na politiku 
ne prkosiš Bogu 
malen su kao zrno graška 
dok čekaš da bol
prestane.

Kada te izbuše geleri
od minobacačke granate 
onda ne razmišljaš o dojmu 
koji ostavljaš na žene 
ili o nacionalnoj himni 
zavučeš se pod kamen 
i čekaš da bol prestane.

Kada se za tobom zatvore
vrata istražnog zatvora 
onda misliš o slobodi.

^{translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright}

My mother dries figs
with her blue-veined hands.
My mother smiles at walnuts
as though time in the heart never started.

SANKİ

Annem incir kurutuyor

Mavi damarlı elleriyle.

Annem cevizlere gülümsüyor

Sanki yürekte zaman hiç başlamamış.

I plucked a honeysuckle when I wanted 
something sweet. My mother cut my hair, 
told me not to leave 
the porch, which is why 
I was running through a stranger’s backyard, 
when it was nearing dark, when I tumbled 
into a metal latch
that held the gate shut.
                                                 Later,
I held napkins to my shoulder, watched each one 
burst: red.

My skin would take days to purple and blue. Each day
I nursed my wound in the bathroom. 
Call it childhood, but under those lights, 
I was cleaning a gunshot crater  from a saloon shoot-out, healing 
the deep slice of a dagger, turned upon me, 
as I battled that zombie through the night. . .

                                                      *

                It was only after she died
that I learned my cousin’s husband locked her
in the bathroom for days at a time. I wonder
what she bartered with,

                              against the God of her mind. 
Here’s a sad story that I’m not supposed to tell: When my mother 
asked why this happened and how and what God could allow

            such suffering

I had to remind her of the time 
she read my diary. 

                          Months later, she confronted me

about the fact that I had sex. She cried

                          and told me everyone makes mistakes

and when I told her it wasn’t a mistake

                          she cried

like someone had died, and maybe

                          I died, because in that diary

that I wrote in for months, hiding out

                          in my dormitory, I wrote down things 

I could never say, like when

                          he entered me, I would beg

to someone inside my mind

                          for him to just speak to me again, or how

at lunch, to keep some peace

                          I would undress, instead of eating

let him move his hands

over me. But all this

my mother did not notice

                          when she read my diary, or maybe

it was just my problem

                          to bare.

                                                      *

When I fantasize about the lives
of other women, goodness
is the thing I envy most.

When I join the gym
it is because I want to feel
like them, but also because I want

to outrun a bear (if I have to),
not that I have ever seen a bear,
but I heard one, once, in the mountains,

it’s feet padding along the dirt 
and trail rot, its body bumping into
a tree’s thick bark—no, when I say

I want to outrun a bear, it is because 
of all those times I am late 
coming back to the apartment 

where my boyfriend waits, and I feel 
this electricity surge through me, 
almost as if I have seen a bear, or I know

one is there, but I am alone 
on the trail, far from home, 
and though I search, I have nowhere 

to run, and what if this time
                                                he is not so kind.

^{after Adrianne Lenker}

I was supposed to be writing you back

I was supposed to be describing my desires

The moment I plugged my ears, not the clouds on the ceiling

How the heat doesn’t burst

Where you sheered the gap with your thighs, a black skirt

A glossy rainbow beetle eating a lanternfly

A wasp displaced from the splintered wood door

How rain flattened the sky

Blank lightning scorching the undone bed

My chest flat with bones which don’t die

Bones, which persist like hair, inanimate, as stones persist

Mostly green indifferent appetites

When the animal god dies it’s spoiled with worms

When anger reaches its iron tongue inside it burns

I used to get off on a small, concentrated sensation

It took years to undo the glue of experience

It’s a big gap for mood

It’s a dark stripe in the darkness

It’s how I remember nothing in particular

Tracks of metal gridding the street

How a body could produce an iron nail if iron in blood assembled

I didn’t think I came but I must have

How angry it made me, the indignity of not touching

The gauzy light on a woman’s face, her idle desires

Compared to the way we fit two hands inside, hungry

How indifferent to particular folds of skin

There was a bottomlessness to the negations

Whatever it was burning gold inside a ring of nots

I, untied, dispensing promise

A commitment of green circling green only

Not what you might think, a hawk in the dead tree

A velvet rope cordoning

Nothing eventful happened so I forgot it

That’s how life moving through space works

Comparing the size of palms, smoothness of thighs

Caught in a loop I knew from history

Not capital, not significant, of a personal nature

A solemn quality of knowledge, what others might call god

Hair collected in an archive versus

Hair drawn in a long strand from one’s crevices

My horoscope says to do the smallest thing possible

The trees say indifferent rattle in the wind

This was life, normal, tidal, I considered it

The dead papering the street with their notices

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          the way it’s scraped off
          those flash-storms of rage

          I grew delicately-feathered
          luna moth antennae
          to fine-tune your emotional weather:
          sometimes a barometric shift
          in the house’s atmosphere / a tight
          quickening / some hard dark shadow
          flickering glossy as obsidian
          pulled down like a nightshade
          behind your irises / but sometimes
          you struck with no warning at all
          rattlesnaked fang of lightning
          incinerating my moon-pale wings
          to crumpled cinder and ash

          now your memory resets
          itself every night / a button
          clearing the trip odometer
          back to zero / dim absinthe fizz
          of radium-green glow
          from the dashboard half-lifing
          a midnight rollover from
          omega to alpha to omega

          I remember when you told me
          (maybe I was three?)
          I was mentally damaged
          like the boy across the street /
          said you’d help me pass
          for normal so no one would know
          but only if I swore to obey
          you / and only you / forever

          now your memory fins
          around and around / like
          the shiny obsessive lassos
          of a goldfish gold-banding
          the narrow perimeters
          of its too-small bowl

          coming home from school
          (maybe I was fifteen?)
          you were waiting for me
          just inside the front door /
          accused me of stealing a can
          of corned beef hash from
          the canned goods stashed
          in the basement / then beat me
          in the face with your shoe

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?
          that I’ve always pined for you
          like an unrequited love / though I
          was never beautiful enough
          for you / your tinned bright laugh
          shrapneled flecks of steel to hide
          your anger when people used to say
          we looked like one another

          but now we compare
          our same dimpled hands /
          the thick feathering of eyebrows
          with the same crooked wing
          birdwinging over our left eye /
          our uneven cheekbones making
          one half of our face rounder
          than the other / one side
          a full moon / the other side
          a shyer kind of moon

          how can I admit I’m almost glad of it
          when you no longer recognize
          yourself in photographs
          the mirror becoming stranger
          until one day—will it be soon?—
          you’ll look in my face / once again
          seeing nothing of yourself
          reflected in it, and—unsure
          of all that you were and all
          that you are—ask me: who are you?

My daughter says six is her favorite year ever
though she suspects that seven will be better.
Her dress spins down the corridor.
It’s made of butterflies and billowing
like the memory of a chocolate souffle.
Was I ever more like her than like me,
shoulders not flagging, breath hot
with awe as I sidestepped each stone,
the promise of age like a helium balloon
dragging me behind it on a flouncy string?
My daughter tries to show me everything
she’s left a mark on: painted clay,
a smiley-faced cotton ball perched on a stick.
her name in all-caps on an envelope.
Does she already somewhere in her spleen
or pancreas, in the soft tissues and marrow, sense
that the impossible goal is, for all of us,
just to keep going? No, she is not grieving
over Goldengrove whatever. Six is her favorite 
year ever, I feel not so much nostalgia
as Sehnsucht, the desire for something
missing, vertigo under the infinite sky. 
We crane our twin heads as a falcon or drone
pierces the cloud cover into the future.
How to get closer to the mystery.
Older, she will do whatever: name a new nation,
isolate a microbe, hear the whales mutter
the muscadine water. Every time the regimes change
she will dance Swan Lake, bending her knees
at the requisite intervals. Attagirl, daughter! 
The economy continues to show resilience
in the face of despair and mass depredation.
My daughter is swan. Is crab grass run riot.
Meanwhile, I am becoming unrecognizable
to everyone except myself, and it does not matter:
before it is time to resemble no one
I have had the mixed fortune to resemble most things.
My shadow lingers in the corner of the photo of the painting.
I may not know more than a bedraggled llama
craning its neck past the impregnable fence. Still,
I participated in the world. I wore the ceremonial
knee breeches required by protocol.
Led her through ferry boats and Ferris wheels,
this ardent daughter clinging to my hand
as though it was God’s hand on a church ceiling.
We took turns licking the strawberry ice cream.
In this knowledge, I feel content.

We met ourselves as we came back 
As we hiked the trail from the north. 
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth. 
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes 
And my tramp shoes mixed in the rain. 
We had climbed for days and days to the North 
And this was the sum of our gain: 
We met ourselves as we came back,
And were happy in mist and rain. 
Our old souls and our new souls 
Met to salute and explain—
That a day shall be as a thousand years, 
And a thousand years as a day. 
The powers of a thousand dreaming skies 
As we shouted along the trail of surprise 
Were gathered in our play: 
The purple skies of the South and the North, 
The crimson skies of the South and the North,
Of tomorrow and yesterday.