I didn’t cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn’t even mad.
I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude
inside the belly for nine months straight.
Two workers welded bunk beds at the end
of the delivery room. One on top of the other.
My universe might have been the whitelime ceiling,
or the embodiment of Einstein’s bent space
in the aluminium springs of the bed above
that curved towards the centre.
Neither cold, nor warm.
‘It was a clear day,’ my mother told me.
It’s hard to believe
there were a few romantic evenings
when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina
and red-laced magma
decadently peeling off
a silver candlestick.
Infants’ cries and milk fever
turned to salt from the stench of bleach –
abrasive, unequivocal.
With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick,
the janitor casually extends the negative space
of the black-and-white tiled floor
like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness
sieving out new human destinies.
2
1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East
dumped punctured rice bags, mice
and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution.
A couple of men in uniform
cleared out the church
in the middle of the night.
The locals saw the priest in the yard
wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold.
Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another:
‘Wasn’t he the one who pardoned our sins?’
Icons burned in front of their eyes,
icons and the holy scriptures.
Witnesses stepped farther back,
as if looking at love letters
nobody dared to claim.
Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth
spilled irreversible promises:
mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down
sooner or later.
Children dragged church bells by the tongue.
(Why didn’t they think of this before?)
Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing
a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd
like flies on a dead horse.
And what could replace Sunday mass now?
Women brought cauldrons into the yard.
Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose
into the air, against gravity’s pull.
Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata
that bled in the wrong places –
a new code of sanctification,
of man, by man.
3
‘Read!’ – I was told. Who said that?
Angel Gabriel, or my first grade teacher
who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls?
Language arrived fragmentary
split in syllables, spasmodic
like code in times of war.
‘Continue where your classmate left off!’
A long sentence tied us to one another
without connotation as if inside an idiom.
Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb,
a third one a pronoun…
I always got the exclamation mark at the end –
a mere grimace, a small curse.
A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator,
puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone.
On the blackboard,
leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before
rubbed against one another like kittens.
After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window,
my eyes glued to a constellation
(they call these types ‘dreamers’)
my discovery possibly a journey into the past,
towards a galaxy already dead, non-existent,
the kind of news that needs millions of years
to reach me.
‘Read!’ – the angel shook me for a third time
her finger pointing to an arbitrary word
a million light years apart from its object. (It didn’t matter who was first.)
Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile
of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.
Contents List
from Almost Yesterday (2012)
10 Almost Yesterday
12 Small-town Stations
14 The Unknown
15 History Class
17 Children of Morality
19 Night Fishing
22 Tobacco
24 Second-hand Books
26 Negative Space
35 Mine, Yours
37 The End of Summer
39 Via Politica
41 The Deal
43 In the Town of Apples
45 Acupuncture
47 First Week of Retirement
49 A Conversation with Charles Simic
51 The Business of Dying
53 Metallic
56 The Body’s Delay
58 Two by Two
60 Gloves
62 I Came, I Saw, I Left…
64 Index
66 Transit Terminal
68 Live Music
69 Ramesses’ Last Journey
from Homo Antarcticus (2015)
72 Homo Antarcticus
87 Something Bigger than Us
89 Menelaus’s Return
91 The Railway Boys
93 Metamorphosis
94 January 1, Dawn
95 Ageing
97 Fishermen’s Village
99 Commit to Memory
100 Cities
103 Anatomical Cut
105 Self-portrait in Woven Fabrics
108 Water and Carbon
120 Home Sweet Home
122 This Gesture
124 The Stairs
126 Lost in Translation
128 A Perfect Day
130 One’s Destiny
131 Inside a Suitcase
132 Things I Liked About Him
Related Reviews
‘Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems take place in a melancholy landscape of mountain villages, chestnut trees, and collapsing futures where “spring kills solitude with its solitude” and the only emotional expression not considered a sign of weakness is impatience. The place of her poems is like a zero point that can only look out from itself in all directions at once. But the poet looks inward beyond paradox, and, instead of judgment, she finds recognition. In Lleshanaku’s work, geography and soul are charted on the same map. The rhythms of her new poems are expertly managed to enact vulnerability and withdrawal. Her lines stretch out and suddenly retract into fragments with the sensitivity of snail horns.’ – Forrest Gander, citation for the 2009 International Kristal Vilenica Prize
‘These impressive poems carry a poignance much like the first buds of spring, a mark of survival and insistent life. In this bewildering human world such articulate determination proves again our common faith. Luljeta Lleshanaku speaks to us one and all.’ – Robert Creeley
‘When you close her book, the images don’t leave you. They cleave you open like a leopard’s paw, and enter into you. Once inside they create their own life, a second life, vastly different from the original. What more can we expect from real poetry, from true art?’ – Ridvan Dibra
